Blogging, whether for personal or business purposes, has taken on a life of its own in the world of new media. As popular as video and audio have become, writing seems to be the fundamental process that all of us go through when we want to share information. Blogs in general are meant to be conversational. Company blogs sometimes have a tough time defining themselves as they adjust the paradigm shift in how businesses interact with people today, but we're seeing more and more success with company blogs and the conversational tone they are using to gain support from the online community. Examples of corporate success reside in huge endeavors made by companies like Southwest Airlines, Dell, Zappos, and H&R Block, just to name a few.

An often asked question is why do people want to read what I have to say? How are they going to find my blog? The easy answer is good writing on a topic that you know a lot about. But it can be so much more than that. If you were to drill down into the finer components of a blog we're looking at keywords, image naming, meta-tags, and a lot of behind the scenes work that can typically help your sites SEO (search engine optimization) when Google, Yahoo, and MSN attempt to find it. But on the surface most of can work with two big winners, categories and tags, both of which can also help your SEO. Ultimately better SEO means better rankings, and who doesn't want that?

Introduction to Categories

Categories can best be explained as the overarching theme of your posts. What ever your niche is, you can typically establish sub-categories under that niche. An example would be if you wrote a food blog, your categories might include Italian, Mexican, Asian, German, etc. These types of food are categories that you might put your posts under. Can you put your post under multiple categories? It's definitely possible to place your post in multiple categories, but it's recommended that you place your post in just one to make it easier to find.

Categories can work like an organizational system. In real life if you had an object that needed to be put away, you'd need to define where it went because it can't go into two places. That's the same thought process behind categories. Too often categories are overlooked, but they provide not just good SEO for the blog as a whole, but also make it user friendly when readers come to your site and specifically want to read posts under a specific category.

Tags Define the Content

Tags are like the high points of the content within the blog post. Unlike categories which offer a general overview of what the post is about, tags define the content a little more specifically. So using the example above, a category might define the blog post as being a post on Italian food, but the tags will specify, using keywords, that the post will discuss "pasta," "cooking noodles," and "colanders." This now tells a reader that while they were interested in reading posts on Italian food, this may or may not be the type of post they were interested in.

More blogs are including tag clouds (a collection of the most used tags in posts) on the front page of their sites to help a reader quickly understand if they are on the right site for what they need. These tag clouds are a nice way to give a synopsis on the posts at-a-glance. In a future post for Blogging 101, we'll discuss the importance of defining keywords, but typically your tags will be the keywords that your audience types in the most to get information on the topics you're writing about.

How Many Categories and Tags?

Good question, with no easy answer. The short of it would be to keep your categories nice and succinct, and the number of tags you use per post limited to a strong three to five words, but there's no hard rule on that. The key is the fewer you have to use, the less confusing your posts will be to readers looking for specific content. One thing to note is that addresses, phone numbers, and other non-related information should never be placed in the tags portion of your blog. Think of it like this, if someone doesn't know you exist, how do they know to search for your phone number or address? The answer is they don't.