Tags, Categories, Trackbacks and your blog

This past week a reader asked: I have just started blogging and I was wondering if you might be able to address the topics of tagging and trackbacks. I don’t think I understand them or know how to go about using them!

The question doesn’t ask about categories, but for me tags & categories are related. They are important to your readers in two very different ways.

Categories are used internally on your blog. When I write a blog post I assign it to a category or two. For example this, will go under Blog Marketing. The categories that you choose help your readers find all the information that you’ve written about a certain topic quickly. After 5 months I went back thru & redid all of our categories because our topics shifted to what people were interested in. Then we added two newsletters with distinctively different focuses.

Tip on categories - Did you know that you can click on any of the terms in our category cloud on the right? Try it! When you set up your blog, you can offer your readers a list or a cloud. In the cloud the topics with more items are represented by the larger type.

Tags are used ‘externally’ when people search. When you assign tags, they are used by Google & other search engines to find your blog. (They become a part of the metadata. Metadata is simply information including the title & tags which are descriptive. You can read more about tags on Wikipedia). So it’s helpful to assign tags that are relevant so that a person searching can find your post. For example, if you had a layout in your blog post using a designer’s kit, it would be helpful to put that designer’s name as a tag.

Trackbacks are a part of a bigger idea all related to linking to your blog post. (I was reading about trackbacks on wikipedia & just learned the difference between terms that I had been interchanging.). The general term is Linkbacks & it’s simply notification that your blog has been linked on somewhere else. And there can be two types of Linkbacks - trackbacks & pingbacks:

• Trackbacks are from another blog - someone has linked to your blog post on their blog (your blogging software ‘notices’ that & generates a ‘trackback’ as a comment). As a good blogger you want to know what people are saying about you, so you follow the trackback by clicking on it in the comment section or from the email & go see what people are saying about your blog. Then, you can leave a comment on their blog. The whole purpose is to further the conversation & build community amongst bloggers who are talking about similar topics by linking them together. It’s a great way to find new blogs to read!
• Here’s an example of a trackback from my post on Live Writer. The first one is a comment & the 2nd is a trackback from James Key Lim’s blog. You can see his post here. Now he will get a trackback from me because I’m linking to his blog. (James also has a cool site called Tellfriends.com) You can set up your blog to notify you of trackbacks by email, just like you get comment notifications.

Here is where we enabled trackbacks & pingbacks in Wordpress (you can see the tabs):

• Pingbacks are linking to previous blog articles that you’ve written. This is extremely helpful to bring older material to the reader’s attention. Maybe they’ve recently started reading your blog & aren’t aware of a related article that you previously posted? So, when I publish that post, I get an email notification of the pingback. And that is also noted in the comment section of the older post.
• This is easy to tell that it’s a pingback because it’s linked from our blog rather than another blog. I wrote a post on Choosing a DSLR camera & linked back to my article on ACDSee’s Pro 2 software. You can see the pingback there.

So, in review, categories are for the reader’s use on the blog, tags help the reader find your blog. Tracksbacks are created when someone links to your blog & pingbacks are generated when you link to previous posts in your blog. These may or may not show up depending on if you’ve turned on the notification. (And I’ve created a # of pingbacks here which will generate some email back to me )

The first question will be ‘Does Blogger support trackbacks?” because I’m getting to know you guys! So I checked into that (just for you!). And it doesn’t, but I found a workaround but it requires the use of Firefox (which you REALLY should be using anyway!). If someone gets it to work, please let us know! Maybe Hummie will experiment with this? (She’s my techie friend that made the really cool Digiscrapping Blogroll on the right - it’s just so spiffy! thank you dear!! Get one for your blog too! - ah! I created another trackback!!

And I really do enjoy researching these types of things, so keep asking questions!

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