Summary: In today’s Q&A, we are helping Mandy Taylor figure out the difference between tags and categories in WordPress.<br> <br> Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you!<br> Click here to ask your question!<br> <br> [Tweet "A good rule of thumb is no more than 10 tags & 2 categories per post"]<br> Let’s dive into this week’s question!<br> SHANE: What's going on guys, welcome back to another Q&A with S&J mini podcast where we answer your questions. Please excuse my voice today before we get started. We just got back from the SEC Tournament to watch our beloved Kentucky Wildcats win the SEC Championship and I yelled a little too much this weekend. We do batch these Q&A podcasts when we record them and we record six to seven at a time so you will hear my raspy voice for the next few episodes over the next couple of weeks because I kind of blew it out now in Nashville. So let's get on to today's question and it comes from Mandy Taylor and we actually had an easy name to read this week, thank goodness. Mandy writes, "What is the difference between tags and categories in WordPress? When should I use each? It's very confusing. Thank you guys for all you do."<br> <br> JOCELYN: Hey Mandy, thanks for your question. I'm gonna start out by talking about categories. Categories are very broad subjects that you would associate your posts with. So for instance, we might do like podcasts because that's a part of our website. So this Q&A might go in the 'Q&A' category and our longer podcast might go on a 'Podcast' category. So you probably won't have a ton of categories on your website; I mean probably a handful, I'd say no more than 10 depending on what you are doing. On my Elementary Librarian site, I have probably three or four. I don’t do a whole lot of categories but it just groups things according to what people are looking for on your website. It's a good idea to only associate a post with one or possibly two categories when you are writing it because it gets really confusing if you put it in too many. So just make sure that you do that as you write your posts. Categories could also be thought of sort of like sections of a library. I would think, me being a former librarian, I think of that – I would think of it sort of as like Fiction, Non-fiction or Biographies. That's how my library was arranged when I was still working at school and those things are more of the categories and actual subjects of books like insects or animals or famous people, those would be more like tags and Shane is going to tell you more about that.<br> <br> SHANE: Tags are basically specific keywords that go with the article you are writing so that people can search in a search bar on your website and easily find articles about that subject or find out what that article was about. For example, jumping off of what Jocelyn said, you may have a broad category called 'Non-fiction books' or 'Non-fiction articles' and then you wrote maybe an article about insects and that specific article was about, I don’t know, ants or beetles or whatever. So you might write – in your tags, you might put things like ants, what's it called ant-nests, I don’t know, whatever we are talking about; we are talking about ants and bugs okay.<br> <br> JOCELYN: This went downhill quickly.<br> <br> SHANE: This went downhill very quickly but you would not tag that post with, I don’t know 'Grasshoppers' and 'Spiders' because the article itself is about ants so whatever you mentioned about ants, maybe you are an Orchid-man and you got a website about how to kill ants, so you write about four specific things that get rid of ants in your house, you would only mention those things in your tags and they are just identifiers. It's just like kind of like putting a post-it note on a page in a book and you want to turn to that page quickly to find that information. When people use your search bar on your site,
