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Tags, the keywords you can use to categorise the content of your blog post, are extremely useful for the blogger. They are usually displayed at the bottom of a post and when clicked will provide a list of blog posts with the same tag.
Your blog benefits from tags in the following ways:
- it helps your visitors find their way around your blog
- it helps search engines classify your content
- it boosts your blog in Technorati
Difference between a category and a tag
Categories and tags are both very useful in organising your content. It helps your visitor find their way around your blog. They help search engines categorise and understand your content.
Logically you should break down the main subject areas of your niche into categories and then use the tags to highlight the sub-categories or topics. This is also useful if a topic crosses more than one category.
I have decided to re-organise this blog. I’m going to set up ten major categories – one for each of my seven stages of blogging, plus a category for each of business blogging, personal blogging and one for campaigning blogs.
My tags would then cover topics, such as writing content, web site promotion and specific posts on say a WordPress plugin, a review of a website, an introduction to a new theme or productivity.
This gives the site a navigation grid allowing the visitor or search engine spider, (the clever software that indexes the internet), find your post through both the category or through the tags.
It helps your visitors find their way around your blog
I have a friend who has a motoring blog. Every month he receives around 400 to 500 visitors the majority from search engines. The visitor stays and reads the specific post, but few, very few visitors read more than one page. That is they have bounced, gone away, and few will come back.
His posts are good, but the navigation on his site is poor. One of the ways he could overcome this is to add tags on different makes of car, different gadgets and specific topics, such as winter tyres.
Like this blog we are going to re-organise his site. There will be categories for car reviews, car news, under the bonnet, (for technical discussions) and specific ranges of gadgets, such as sat-navs.
He’ll then use tags to give more detail. He’ll then have a set of tags for a car make, (say Ford), the specific model and the type – say hatchback.
As these changes to his site will make it far easier to someone find their way around the site, building up the number of page views and building up traffic.
It helps search engines classify your content
Somewhere within the great Google empire there is the magic machine – the computer, or probably the network of computers, that index a huge chunk of the internet.
But, and this is an important but, the computers are computers. The only way that they can identify which is the best set of web pages to serve up to a particular user search is to see how those words are associated with other words.
The search engine knows that certain words in a post are more important than others. So headings, words in bold are significant. Tags are also prized as humans have decided to catagorise the post with these terms.
The computers will then compare the tags from one site with the same tags from other sites. So if a blog was writing about films and the tag – Brad Pitt was entered then the Google computer would trawl all the other taqgged Brad Pitts and would have links to his career, his films and the gossip about him. This information would then help the computer to widen its classification of the post.
It boosts your blog in Technorati
Technorati is the leading blog directory. Once your blog has five or six posts you should sign up to this service. It will not only boost the number of visitors to your site, but because Technorati makes extensive use of tagging the visitors are usually looking for a specific topic. Most visitors I’ve had from Technorati have spent some time on the site, visiting an average of five pages.
Technorati uses tags, links, number of visitors and it’s spiders to rate blogs with an overall rating, ie their ranking compared to all the other blogs in the directory. The site also ranks blogs in a wide variety of categories. In addition you can search for specific keywords to display a list of all listed blog posts that may have that term.
I recommend all bloggers sign up for this service. If you are writing a personal blog use the classification – Living. (See the statistics for Beginning to Blog – but bear in mind that the blog has only been running for two months).
Conclusion
Tags are very useful for guiding and retaining visitors on your blog. The search engines use tags to classify and understand your content. Both will boost your blog’s authority, which in turn builds your ranking and traffic.
Technorati also uses tags to rank your blog. I recommend that all bloggers join Technorati and get their sites listed in the directory.
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