As an avid blogger, you should make it a priority to carefully organize your site so that your readers find it easy to navigate. While adding categories to your blog is a helpful way of organizing postings by similar content, tags take your content a step further.
Tags in a Nutshell
Tags are labels that group posts together with a single word or key phrase. They assist your readers in finding posts that are related. They are similar to categories, in that they direct your readers to similar content, but are more versatile, in that they connect the reader directly to a more specialized posting. For example: You might have a category called “dogs”; however, you might be writing about training dogs and include a tag like “training poodles” that will direct a reader to similar postings on that topic, rather than everything that you have written about dogs.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Specific tags, with single words or brief categories, improve your blog’s search engine ranking. Think about a basic Google search: If you were looking up culinary blogs, you won’t be directed to every culinary blog on the planet, just a select few that appear on the first few pages of Google’s result. Tags can help search engine users navigate to your page by helping it appear higher on those search engine results (i.e. on one of the first few pages of Google’s results or even, ideally, the top of the first page). For example: You might include the tag “organic farming” on a blog post; this would help Google associate that blog post with the search engine query “organic farming,” thus improving the chances that your blog post pops up if a Google users enters that phrase.
Tagging Tips
Use the same tags over and over (if they are appropriate). If you write about motivational speaking often, stick to one tag, such as “motivational speaking.” This is less confusing and more organized than using several tags, like “motivational speaking” and “inspirational speaking” and “speaking for an audience.” Also: Keep it simple. You do not want to confuse your readers or use unnecessarily complicated words. Be sure to also check out other blogs. Go to your favorite blogs that are easy to navigate and see how they are effectively using tags. Manage your tags in a similar fashion. Finally, get to know your audience. Use tags that they will easily understand and will connect them with content that interests them. That is the point, after all.
By Guest Author – Melissa Woodson is the community manager for @WashULaw, a top-tier online LLM in U.S. law and a premier llm degree offered by Washington University in St. Louis. In her spare time, she enjoys running, cooking, and making half-baked attempts at training her dog.
