What is the Difference between Keywords and Tags - Keywords vs Tagging

Though the two words, Keywords and Tagging are mostly used as a synonym of each other and most people think that these two words are the same, they both are totally different and they both serve two different purposes. They do overlap at some points, and I have explained it below.

Keywords are the words, which are searched by people in Internet and those are the "Rich" words, which most of the advertisers required to high-light and show the advertisements. For example, let us take one of my article, "Fire Your Boss - Earn $5000 and Above", in another website. If you open this article, you can see few words like "Earn money online", "Free Money" are all, high-lighted and some ads related to those keywords published along side.

You might have heard of the word SEO almost everywhere in Internet, which means Search Engine Opitmization. This Search Engines job is to crawl through all the websites and find for the keywords. If there are more relevant keywords in a page, it will rank that page highly and push it to the top of the search engine pages like google, yahoo, bing, etc...

So, to summarize again,

Keywords are the one searched mostly in Internet and those are the words used by SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques to rank your article. If your article is rich with keywords, then SEO techniques will push them above in the rank, thinking your content is valuable.

But, don't try to fool the SEO, by just dumping more keywords, without any meaning, and no useful content in your website. Because SEO has its own techniques to identify the content, which was just dumped with Keywords and no other fruitful messages.

Tag is more like categories. It can also be termed as Labels.

Let us say, you have a blog about cooking. So, you may need to classify your works as "Vegetarian Items", "Non Vegetarian Items", "Fruits and Salads", "Desserts", "Cocktails" and so on. So, each term will become a tag.

By clicking a tag "Fruits and Salads", all those articles, tagged below that category will be shown to the users. So tag helps to group up similar articles together.

For music lovers, I can explain with an example like "Pop Song in one Folder" and "Light music in another Folder".

All the Keywords used in your content can be used as a tag. By doing that, your article will come under two or more categories, but still it is useful. For example, a recipe with an apple can come under "Fruits and Salads" as well as "Vegetarian Items". By doing so, you doubles the chances of that particular article, as it will be shown when people come in search of "Fruits and Salads" as well as for those who are in search of "Vegetarian Items".

But not all Tag words can be used as a Keyword. I can use "Vegetarian Items" as a tag for a recipe using apple, but I cannot keep using this word as a keyword in my recipe.

Obviously a Keyword weighs more, as it brings traffic to your site or article. But Tag adds to the value of your page, as it helps to categorise your subject.

For example, if some one searches for an article "Keyword Vs Tag", then my article will be shown up in google search, if my hub about this has rich keyword. But, let us say there are lots of other articles out there in hubpages already about the same topic, then hubpages will not push my article up to the hands of Google, if I didn't tag it properly, as hubpages will not bother about keyword, but minds tagging more, as it categories the hubs accordingly and handles them in that way.

So, the success lies in the use of best keywords in your hub / article and tag them properly, so that the chances of viewing gets doubled.