What are Tags and why do you need them? Tags are used to classify and identify an item within your blog. Think of them as page markers or ‘Post-It’ notes that you may use to flick back to favorite or important sections in a book! You need tags because they not only help complement your categories but also boost the credibility of your blog!
All Wordpress blogs have the Tag feature built in, as such you might want to take advantage of it and use Tags correctly.
Here is what to do.
- Complement the Categories With Tags:
- Use tags as descriptive headings:
- Reuse your tags & develop consistency:
A common problem with tagging is that the tags are the same as the categories. Remember, your tags aren’t categories; they are complements to your categories.
Tags don’t describe your blog as a whole; instead they describe individual sections of the blog
The tagging system is useless when the tags you use vary. For instance, if you have a series of posts on web technologies, you could tag them as “Web 2.0” “Enterprise 2.0,” “Web Tools,” or a hundred other variations. The important thing is that you choose one of them, and then reuse it on every post you ever write on the topic.
You will notice the more articles or blog posts that use the same tags the larger the tag words will become in the Tag Cloud. This helps readers to search and find popular content and your blog articles.
For instance, If I wish to find an article about YouTube; rather than conduct a search which will bring up every instance of the word in your blog, I am more likely to get good results by clicking a tag and only seeing the posts which have been specifically tagged as discussing YouTube.
As I mentioned earlier; Tags are default in Wordpress and you stand to gain significant advantaged by implementing and using them properly.
