—internally being what I think of as blog administrator (whether sole-blogger or administrator of a group blog like Joyful Jubilant Learning), and then
—externally being if I did a mind-map from a reader’s point of view (or from my participating JJL authors) point of view.

I am primarily a visual learner and thinker, and I like to draw pictures and mindmaps w/good old pencil and paper. As far as categories and tags go, some past blog design mindmaps I have done for Ho‘ohana Publishing have looked like a nightmare, and I knew I had to trim. As a sidenote, doing them in Hawaiian was a big help to me at times, for we use way less Hawaiian words: English is far too adjective-complicated. Come actual “hit publish” time, I’d go back to English after the Hawaiian gave me focus.

The mindmapping has helped me be more objective, because as an author versus an editor, I can get way too emotionally connected to things – even my categories and tags LOL! After much very messy learning on JJL, I finally started using categories very, very sparingly + for authors indexes only (but that is part of a TypePad limitation story).

Meryl, I used the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin until WordPress added tagging as a native functionality a while back. UTW did have many more options, including passing tags to Technorati. I’m confident that WP will add in some of that functionality over time.

Joanna and Chris, my question/issue with changing the permalink structure to eliminate categories from the URL is this – if the category name is a keyword, isn’t it beneficial from an SEO standpoint to have that keyword repeated in all those URL’s?

Thanks to all of you for your comments, ideas, and questions!!

On BIG word of caution with that plugin is that it is no longer supported by the plugin author. So use it with extreme caution.

I didn’t find another plugin that will do the same thing with a quick Google search. Unfortunately I don’t have time this AM to do a thorough check.

If a blog post is like a file folder, full of information, then your categories are like the drawers you put the posts into. Since you can’t put a file folder into more than one drawer at a time then you probably shouldn’t put a post into more than one category at a time, generally speaking. And it would be a bit of a waste of space to have an entire drawer with only one folder in it.

Following that analogy then tags would be like stickers you’d put on the file folders so you could tell at a glance what you put in the folder. There’s no reason why you can’t put several stickers on the file folder. And you may have stickers that you use only once because that’s the only time you mentioned that specific topic (person/company/idea/etc.) in your blog.

There are a couple advantages to using both categories and tags. Using both well will help your readers (and you) find the right blog post easier when looking for specific information. There is also a strong SEO benefit to using both well.

Tags are little pieces of information that the search engines weigh heavily when ranking web pages. Tagging well will help your posts rank higher.