At the beginning of this year when I made the decision to move WordPress, I was presented with a new dilemma that I had never had before.   That dilemma is whether to use categories as I had been doing with Typepad, or to use the tagging options I now had available to via WordPress plugins.  With the recent release of WordPress 2.3 and the new ability to use tags “out of the box,” I think this is a good time to open up a discussion on whether to use categories or tags.

First, I’ll start out by pointing to a recent guest post on Pro Blogger titled Using Categories or Tags Effectively on Your Blog.  This post gives you a lot of information about both categories and tags, as well as helping to create a great way to visualize each type.  I thought it was well written, and the author encourages bloggers to use both on their blogs, but for different purposes.

As some readers may have noticed, I choose not to display my blog’s categories, as this blog covers a wide variety of topics, leaving me with roughly 30 categories that I use regularly.  Instead, I set up each category to automatically count as a tag and then I choose to display my blog’s tags with each individual post (which combines my tags with the category I use).   This allows me more flexibility to use all sorts of tags and my designated tags are then converted to meta tags for search engines.   I feel these tags not only improve site navigation for readers, but also help give search engines a better idea of what my post is about and how to properly index it. 

Using something like Ryan’s Recommended Tags plugin is great because it helps me to control the number of tags I’m using and keep them more useful to the readers that use them.    I’ve also considered possibly using a tag cloud in the sidebar, but haven’t gotten around to experimenting with that yet. 

So, that is why I do what I do on this blog.  Do you use categories, tags, or both?  I’d love to hear your answer and your reasons in the comments below!!