Categories and Tags are Slowly Dying

Tags and categories are two of my worst enemies when it comes to writing posts. When you think about adding tags to your post, you either have to stick with a strategy of adding one or two tags to each post, or every tag imaginable. Unless you incorporate the tags into your content, you aren’t really utilizing their benefit unless you are able to somehow have the tags indexed in search engines, and this isn’t good for SEO. Sure, they may add keywords to your content, adding links back to other areas of your site, but they are often more of a nuisance than anything else.

We are currently going through a new period in which tags and categories aren’t really that important. While I don’t want to bring up Twitter again, I will. The service is based around search. There may be “hashtags” that can be used to make the process easier of finding information, but in the end, you are still searching. Only recent results will be returned, and depending on the number of results, it can be quite daunting to search through them all. However, Twitter wasn’t meant to be used like a search engine, more so an open chat interface.

A majority of my site’s traffic doesn’t click through the categories listed in the sidebar, and if I were to place tags there, it would simply look cluttered. By going an extra step and completely removing the categories, I could focus even more on creating a better experience for the users of the site.

What is ultimately more important than categories is making your archives page accessible and focusing on a few main areas of your site, and this doesn’t necessarily require using tags. Search results all return unique URL strings, which can be used instead of categories, and your content will definitely include those keywords. This makes it easier for your visitors to find what they may be looking for.

I don’t know many large sites that still use tags of a wide array of categories in their sidebars as a way for their visitors to navigate their site. They focus on placing a selection, possibly six to ten or so categories in the header, which creates a distinction between the different areas of the site. If you don’t want to read the “Entertainment” section, you can go over to the “Business” section. This makes it possible for the blog owner or content producer to easily separate the different topics, while categories may not be focused enough – some would overlap and the separation wouldn’t be there.

Third-party tools like tag clouds can be created without much effort, automatically gathering frequently used terms on your site, not requiring much additional input on your part. It makes it easier if you chose to avoid using tags. After all, less than two years ago, WordPress began supporting tags within themes right out-of-the-box. Blogger still doesn’t have an efficient tag/category system, and other platforms are still lagging further behind.

An intelligent system where the blog platform would automatically choose categories based on the type of content we write and how we incorporate terms into the site would make the process a lot more efficient. Yes, adding tags and categories can certainly help, but unless you have previously visited a site and know exactly where to look within each category, this type of support isn’t required with search engines and search boxes incorporated into the blogs themselves.