The question is, how to determine what these should be to make it easy for a visitor to find your blog post?

Why categorise and tag blog posts?

Simply to enable visitors to quickly get to the blog post which interests them and answers their question.

In addition to adding categories and tags, posts can also be date/time coded. Using these three approaches (category, tag and date/time) allows postings to be ‘sliced and diced’ so that your visitor can get to the relevant blog post quickly.

How to identify categories and tags?

This is known as designing the blog taxonomy – identifying unique categories and tags that will be used for all blog posts.

There are two things to consider:

• The greater the number of categories and tags the finer grained it will be possible to set each blog post.
• Too many categories and tags can result in blog post subject overlaps which can easily results in too many low quality visitor search matches.

Getting started …

So, the best approach is to start off with a small number of categories. These could be the main goods or services you provide or main subjects that you will blog about. It is worth recording these.

Next, create some initial blogs and categorise them. When this is done identify an initial set of tags and tag these blogs.

Finally, review how the blog categories and tags are distributed and make any changes.

Thereafter, as you create new blogs try to use these blog categories and tags unless there is a good reason not to.

Blogs fall into two basic categories; personal and business.

The aim of of a blog is twofold; to build an on-line community to give and receive information and secondly, to enhance your web presence as search engines love blogs because they represent active content.

Blog websites can be installed either standalone or integrated with a business CMS website solution (like this one).

For a professional installation, the ‘look and feel’ of the blog site should be consistent with the main website so that switching between the two is seamless for the visitor.

Business Blogs

A business blog is an informal way of marketing your business, ideas, goods, and services.

It allow you to inform visitors about new business developments, create a buzz, and seek feedback on ideas for new products and services.

Blogs are often run in parallel with other social media routes to market, for example, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

Personal Blogs

Typically an informal on-line diary used to express your thoughts and gain feedback from others.

Social media is primarily online communities with shared interests meeting to exchange content and views.

Some of the more popular social media examples are:

• Picture and video sharing – Flickr and YouTube.
• Social networking – Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
• Professional networking – Linkedin.
• Wikis - Wikipedia.
• Collaboration - Delicious and StumbledUpon.
• Blogs - personal and company blogs.

With social media sites, adding content typically requires you to register your details. However, registration is not required on some sites where the content is publically available as in the case of businesses promoting their company products and brands through the likes of Facebook. In general, the whole essence of social media is to be both a provider and consumer of information.