Yesterday I started explaining the different of categories and tags, but mostly explained categories. If you need to catch up, start here, otherwise– onward towards tags!
Let’s break it down.
Categories are the big picture words describing your blog, and tags are the minutely unique nuances of your posts.
I have categories. Why is it important to tag?
Tags are the closest thing you have to the ability to decide how search engines and readers stumble across your blog. Better navigation can lead to increased engagement and sticky visitors– instead of the clicks that seem to just pass through. Like categories, tags can also be used to link related content together.
If you feel like search engines are a long-shot for your entire blog because there isn’t exactly new or qualified content, and if your readers currently have no trouble finding your old posts– then you probably don’t need tags. Otherwise, it’s only a few seconds of your time after you post– time well spent.
Should I be a tag liar?
It’s tempting to tag all your posts with “free donuts” in an effort to bribe the search engine, or words that are popular but just don’t apply to your content. Not only will this not achieve the results you want, but when you are caught– and you will be caught– you’ll be penalized by feeders and search engines. They’re robots, but they’re smarter than you think.
Liars annoy search engines. And you wouldn’t like them when they’re annoyed.
How many tags is ideal?
More than 4, less than 13. Remember if your total number of tags PLUS categories exceed 15, you will not appear in the WordPress reader.
Why not less than 4? Sometimes, my post isn’t about that much.
Everything is about something. Less than 4 is like saying you’ve only posted random words all over a page that don’t even have enough interconnected meaning to muster 4 words.
Why not more than 13? More is better, right? Get it out there!
The robots that browse your site to understand what each post is about can only eat so much at a time. If they’re looking to eat 12 things, and you have 24, they’ll go elsewhere– and you’ll be skipped. Every search engine, and even WordPress, tells you exactly that as clearly as possible.
I write poetry. Sometimes I tag it “poetry” sometimes “poem”– is there a difference?
Yes. There’s even a difference between “poem” and “poems”. The best thing to do is to tag alternating posts with 1 of 3 variations– and then see if there’s any measurable results. If there’s not, go with the one you want and rock it. Unless you are a highly prolific blogger (three or four times more active than me), a dedicated reach is more powerful than a wide one.
If that seems like something you can’t commit to, and only you would know that– then just pick one and go with it.
Are there rules that I don’t know about tagging?
Maybe, but let’s call them guidelines:
- DO : Only use tags that are less than two words long, unless you’re being funny. If you are a prompt site asking people to tag, it’s always best to consolidate your tag– from Daily Post Challenge to dpchallenge, from Prompts for the Promptless to ForThePromptless.
- DON’T: Don’t tag something that your blog will only mention less than 10% of the time. Search engines will consider that a sign that your blog isn’t enough about that topic to be relevant.
- DO: Do tag something that your blog rarely mentions if it’s hyper specific and might be hunted down by dedicated readers. For example, I often troll the ‘net for “Farscape” articles and thoughts. If you mention Farscape, tag it, because while a search engine might skip it– a reader might be seeking it out.
- DON’T : Don’t tag everything on your blog “life”, or other sweepingly generic phrases. This is helpful to neither search engine nor reader. When was the last time you searched for relevant topics on “life”? Your tags should be somewhere between ridiculously generic and hyper specific.
How do I know what to tag?
Tags need to be guided for both search engine acceptance, and for the mind of a searching reader– so it’s not a totally calculatable science. There are many ways you can go about making this decision.
- See what others readers are doing. You can browse the most popular trending tags on WordPress here: http://en.wordpress.com/tags/ , or you can go into your reader. If you write poetry, do a search for poem, poems, poetry, poet, etc– and see which result generates the results you like.
- See what the search engine experience is. Go to your search engine of choice, and try to find your blog starting with wordpress.com and then using some other keywords. It’s less important if your blog shows up, and more important to see what words you’d think to use. It’s probable that your readers think the same way.
- Mimic your favorite competition. Go to another blog with a similar genre/niche and see how they do it. Is it easy or difficult for you to navigate through their posts? What makes it so?
- Work backwards– find a list of good keywords for your industry or genre, and apply them to relevant posts. Again, relevant. Because if it’s not relevant, you’re a liar– and see above picture for more details. To do this, you can search out the many websites that will generate a list of search engine terms for you.
- Ask a friend. If you were looking for a post explaining tags and categories, with a definite WordPress.com blog slant to it– what would you look up?
Is there any point in adding tags to old posts where I did this wrong?
Yes– if it’s a topic where you want search engines and readers to consider you an expert. It’s not always a fair system of judgement, but the internet tends to work on a “more unique content equals better content” measurement. If you’ve been writing meatball soup recipes since 2007, you’ll want to let the internet know that you mean business when it comes to meatball soup.
I have plenty of traffic already, and sometimes they go to totally uncategorized posts, so, oh well.
I’d buy that for a quarter.
Yay! That is good news, but it’s a lot like saying that friends already come up to you all day and give you dimes for free. Being search engine friendly is a way to make strangers come up to you and give you quarters. Quarters are better because you can use them in quarter machines. It’s good that you’re happy, but there is more available out there. Category and Tag attributions will not diminish your dime-crowd, it’ll just bring you a new crowd, too.
It’s also a useful tool for people to find blog posts that have been wasting away in the archives.
However, if you’re quite happy with your current crowd, then only worry about it if it turns out they struggle with finding your posts. Very few of my readers come via the reader– most of you pop over from your email.
Special things to consider:
- Tags can be just for you, too. They can make it easy to secretly organize a section of your blog. For example, I intend to re-tag all my posts related to my family with the family members involved. This way, if I ever feel like I’m missing my little sister too much, I can revisit all the posts where I speak about her. It’s not as blatantly obvious as a category, but it’s still an easy organizational method. I also have a setting where all posts that are tagged “42″ do not show all the side widgets– just in case I ever have a very image heavy post that doesn’t look good with all the busy noise on the side of my blog.
- Only wordpress.com calls these tags. If you want to seek out good content on the internet, you can also search for meta tags, or keywords, or post slugs, or post tags.
- Tags and categories are only the first piece of search engine optimization. For me, I’m really only worried about them as it relates to my readers being able to find what they want– and me being able to quickly reference a certain style of posts from my past. Two areas that have more impact on search engines are your slugs, and your image alt tags. Are you keeping those up to date?
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And thus ends the crazy thought process on categories and tags. All of this started because WordPress suggested that I use “phhffffftt” as a tag since it was amongst my most used. How on earth did I type that enough times to be amongst my most used?? That was the first to go.
What would you look up in your reader or search engine to find this post? Do you have any questions that I didn’t cover?
