Understanding Categories and Tags

Each post is assigned to a category.

A post can be assigned to more than one category. Categories are used for organizing posts by subject/theme as opposed to time (default organization of blog posts).

You can create a category when you are writing a post or through the category management tab.

Each Category has a page which you can link to.

 So if you have a category called networking you can create a link to the networking category page which displays all posts belonging to that category.

There are many ways of displaying and organising categories using in built functions and third party plugins.

Tags are a new feature introduced in WordPress 2.3 and allow you to assign keywords to posts for organisation. Tags were made popular by blogging aggregators like Technorati.

Although tags and categories are very similar they are not the same.

The way to use categories is for content organization and tags to help blogging aggregators organise your posts as they don't have access to the category data, as it is  internal to WordPress and not part of the post.

Pages don't have categories or tags! So when using WordPress pages you don't need to worry about either.

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