It’s one of the simplest things you can do to promote your blog or website, but not many of us do it properly. Tagging has a number of benefits, if done correctly and this post summarises the impact that tagging can have on other sites - and ultimately your own traffic.
Whats a tag again?
Tags are simple words or phrases that you attach to an item which describe particular properties or characteristics of it. In the world of blogging this normally means pulling some of the main keywords out for a particular blog post.
I might be tagged as “trendy, twenty something, web geek, programmer”. All of those tags together give a better picture of who I am - and the same is true for a blog post. Do it properly and both humans and machines (i.e. the search engines) can begin to build up a better picture of what something is about.
Why?
1) Technorati
If you are a blogger - you already know about Technorati - basically its the best blog search engine out there - its also frequently where blog news breaks on the web. i.e the most recent stories being discussed in the Blogosphere (and therefore in the media) are listed on the home page, mainly because it is pinged in real time. Tag your posts with the correct sort of terms, and expect to be found on Technorati. I kind of stumbled upon this by accident - writing a post on another of my Blogs about Saddam Hussein when his execution video went online…and lo and behold kaboom went my traffic referrals from Technorati.
2) Del.icio.us
Ahh.. the social bookmarking tool of choice. Full of all things Web point twoey. Im addicted. Take care when promoting (*ahem*) posting links to delicious, that they are properly tagged. Its also worth mentioning that tagging posts with the popular tags for that day - see the tag cloud below..Shows what keywords are worth tagging your posts with. The bigger the link, the more likely this link will get clicked on from the delicious home page. So do a bit of research before blindly trying to get to the front page of del.icio.us. Those extra few tags may help get you found.
3) Related posts plugin.
When I first started blogging, I paid little or no attention to putting relevant tags alongside my posts. When I installed the related posts plugin for Wordpress, I knew that I was going to have to go back and start rethining my tagging strategy. As this plugin relies heavily on tagging to determine relevance, it was returning any related posts, because none of them were tagged properly. Lesson learned. Make sure you dont make the same mistake, and if you haven’t got this plugin installed at the minute - why ever not? It majorly helps to keep your bounce rate down.
4) Other websites
There are many other websites / blog searches out there that use blogging tags to syndicate your content, and many use tags to determine how to groups your content. Therefore the more accurate this is, the better for your SEO efforts, as backlinks will be around the same topic.
Worthy of a mention..
So you are a lazy webmaster. You cant be bothered with all of this tagging malarchy, and would like something to do it for you. Yes something exists, and that something is called Jiglu. Not Gigolo..Jiglu. A great project for automating tagging on all kinds of blogs. Check it out.
Great amalgam of information here. I’m going to investigate lots of these hints.
Appreciate that it’s written in a language that a ” not twenty something ” can get!
Thanks for posting this.
Bonnie Luria
Many thanks for your feedback Bonnie.
Paul Anthony
Thanks for this great article - its not easy to find real information online -strangely enough :) - so I should be tagging even if keywords are present in the text of the article? Technoratie etc look at tags first?
masha
Hi Masha,
Yes you should be tagging even if there are keywords in the article - in fact you should be pulling these out and using them *as* the tags.
Paul Anthony
Thanks for that. Hmm. Many fun hours lie ahead, studiously tagging…
masha
No problem at all. Have fun!
Paul Anthony