What is the real difference between Tags and categories

[whitey]

Originally Posted by virgohippy

Tags are more organic, categories are more of a long-term organizational architecture.

The biggest advantage of tags is that they can be added on demand and dropped when no longer in use. They're a quick and dirty way to organize content, very much in line with the way people tend to think anyway. Especially handy when you have multiple authors who might not know how to "categorize" from a list of available categories, but can easily assign "keywords" or "tags" to a piece of content.

Note, some tag search engines (like technorati) see this url structure "domain.com/tags/sometag" as a tag page.

That is a very good perspective on organizational structure.

I would also add that categories and tags are treated somewhat differently by search engines.

If you are using an SEO plugin like All in One SEO, you can have meta-tags on your primary Category pages.

With tags, as you described, they are more one keyword, organic in the search results.

Generally, you do not want both indexed as they are often duplicative. I generally opt to have tags indexed when the subject of the blog does not have clear, identifiable, finite categories. I have categories indexed where there are identifiable and finite categories. It also somewhat depends on the theme one is using and how one is organzing the theme.

Finally, tags are very relevant for news type blogs as the newsy type blog aggregators (such as Technorati) focus on tags, while with SE's I tend to have better search results on Categories (because of ability to use meta-tags I think).