One of the most under-rated features of Content Management Systems (CMS) is the user-friendliness that comes standard. Many systems with the likes of WordPress and Google’s Blogger make it as simple as possible for a surfer to launch a blog and start posting pretty much anything.
Like anything else in life, when we get something easily — it is usually accompanied by laziness. Many bloggers (including me at times) tend to write up the article but then overlook the smaller customizations that are offered per post.
Before publishing a post, it is critical to go through a checklist of steps that ensures you have ticked the proper categories, the proper publish time, the desired settings, the required custom fields and the step that is so often neglected; inserting your post tags.
Tags are critical for user-friendliness, user-accessibility and even Search Engine Optimization. Let me tell you a bit about it..
I’ll be using WordPress CMS as an example throughout this post, but similarly, if not exactly the same applies to Blogger, Typepad or any other CMS for that matter. This idea of tagging your post is pretty simple, but it can easily get a bit messy. So, I want to keep this post as simple as possible by breaking it into three digestible parts.
The What?
We all have a rough idea what tags are and what they do, but just to set things clear — let’s take a look at the official “definition” given by the WordPress Developers themselves;
Tags refers to micro-categories for your blog, similar to including index entries for a page. Posts with similar tags are linked together when a user clicks one of the tags. Tags have to be enabled with the right code in your theme for them to appear in your post.
That definition is right on the money, but there is more to it. A few significantly important aspects of tags have gone unmentioned.
An article or post with a specific set of tags has two main on-site benefits — it helps your CMS group similar posts together and helps your visitors to perform a simple search and locate specific posts on a specific topic. There are simply too many sites that have a search bar but don’t return queries with appropriate results.
Without proper tags, we force the CMS to identify keywords and produce search results on its own. This method might be the lazy way out by avoiding adding tags to your posts, but it usually returns with rubbish results. Especially if you have a lot of content on a wide range of topics, a search on posts without tags can return some very random results.
The Why?
In a nutshell - Tags help internet users and search engines locate your content. That’s simply what it does, and the better your tagging, the higher the probability of users finding your content.
Tags are applied everywhere on the internet because pretty much everything depends on it. Even though we might not see it directly, every single Google, Yahoo or MSN search depend on a form of tags. We search for a string of characters, and in return — the search engine goes looking for those exact or similar characters on different websites.
The same process occurs locally on your WordPress blog too. When a visitor performs a search, the CMS runs through the post tags to find similar posts. By tagging your articles, it makes it easier for the search engine to identify your site’s content and your page’s purpose. The same rule applies to your META-Tags that are more SEO-orientated than the topical post-tags, but they both ultimately play the same role.
The How?
You can implement tags on your blog in a couple of ways. The most effective way would be to visit each and every post and insert tags that are custom to that post itself, but if you have a large database of posts — this method would be very time-consuming.
I would recommend this very useful WP-Plugin called (UPDATED) Simple Tags. The plugin comes with almost every tagging feature you will ever need. Everything from Technorati tags to Post Tags to Category tagging is included in one simple plugin. The biggest bonus with this plugin is — it allows you to tag 20 posts at a time! This can really save a lot of time than having to edit each and every article on your CMS.
There are heaps of nifty features within the plugin that doesn’t really effect this post but things like Tag Clouds and Feed tags are somethings you can look into too.
The End.
Hopefully that cleared up a few things, but if there’s still somethings you aren’t comfortable with — drop us a comment below and I’ll surely get back to you!
37 Discussions
Thanks for writing this post. I didn’t really know what tags were before. I first thought they were keywords.
No worries, TheBlur!
I’m glad you’ve found it useful because it’s an very important aspect of blogging and as well as SEO
I use the auto tagger plugin
I love having as many tags as possible ..
I too use the plugin mention in the post. I love Wordpress
Ali Hussain’s last blog post..What Is Blogger’s Block
I don’t blame you, Wordpress is very umm.. lovable
I have just one quesion, haha.
What exactly are technorati tags?
Evan’s last blog post..Teens and Good Friends
Good question Evan, very good question.
I’ve tried to find a proper answer to this question even before we start Blogussion. However, to date – I don’t really have a definite answer!
From my “research” I’ve come to the conclusion that Technorati tags serve the same purpose as your post tags or your META-Tags. It helps crawlers (in this case, Technorati’s crawler) identify and ultimately index your content.
Quoted from DailyBlogTips;
* technorati tags will allow more people to find your blog
* technorati tags will increase the traffic coming from Technorati
* technorati tags will increase the keyword density of your posts
* technorati tags will increase your search engine traffic
Ah thank you! Better start thinking about signing up for Technorait in the future.
Evan’s last blog post..Back to the Basics
Haha, this got me thinking Janith. I have been forgetting to tag a few of my posts here lately. Gotta start remembering!
I just realized this too! I’ve been tagging my posts *whistles*
No worries man, the categories are tagged – so we are doing alright.
A few months back I was reading another blogging tips saying that tagging can actually help to bring in extra traffic because blog search engines like Technorati and Ice Rocket depends on tags for relevance. However, I have yet to see a significant amount of traffic coming in from these sites or as a result of my tagging. I actually replaced the tag cloud on my sidebar with a list of categories. I have never thought of the usability issues when tags are being shown on a blog sidebar or post footer. What will be your priority? Categories or tag clouds or both?
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I have personally never seen extra traffic from tagging, but maybe it’s because I wasn’t using good enough tags? Who knows, but I don’t usually show tags anywhere in my blog. Just the categories.
Tags don’t directly bring in traffic, but it helps search engines (i.e Google) and blog engines (i.e Technorati) rank your content.
The better your ranking, the more exposure you will get obviously – which results in more traffic
Tagging is all about assigning keywords to your content, so non-human bots can return people’s searches with results that are as targeted as possible (Hopefully that wasn’t confusing).
Personally, I don’t like using tag-clouds (especially the animated sphere type) because it does tend to look messy, and unbalanced emphasis on keywords – just not my thing.
However, SEO wise it is pretty significant, but then again it’s not the only SEO technique we know. I find the ugliness outweigh the benefits of a tag-cloud
I guess that’s why you’re the SEO guy around here and I’m just the ‘other stuff’ guy. xD
Oh please, I can vouch to the fact your more than just the “other stuff” guy
On blogs I want to get a lot of SEO work done on, I work on tags. However, on personal blogs I am generally too lazy to do stuff like that
Then again, I am trying to use tags a lot more nowadays!
Nice post Janith.
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Haha, no worries – Dan. Glad you found it useful.
The main reason behind this post was to remind people of tagging because I know how easily we can forget about them! There was a period of time, that I neglecting keywords as a whole (on every level of SEO) and just wrote content… Take my word for it; I suffered.
It was really bad, SEO-wise the blog was a MESS. I eventually gave up on it because there was way, way too much to even consider fixing
Are we sure that plugin still works? The page itself say compatible up to 2.2.3..
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I guess we don’t know for sure. But a lot of plugins I know of that haven’t been upgraded to 2.7 usually work fine. Hopefully Janith tested it first!
Oh my, I’ve linked to the old plugin.
My apologies everyone, the successor to Simple Tagging called Simple Tags works with WP-2.7.
Wordpress.org hasn’t updated it’s Extend Section
Very cool, thanks!
Perhaps I’m picky, dunno, but I’d think WP would be on top of such things, no?
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I thought so too ~ but I guess we are all just human
I think we should send in a feature request to the guys at WordPress for auto tagging built into WordPress. It would be remarkably helpful!
I use tags all the time they are auto generated by a plugin i have installed. So it is super easy to add them. I also olny put a post in one category to sculpt the structure of my site for eventual site links in Google.
Online Marketing Blog’s last blog post..Great SEO Quiz
Nice idea! We restrict our posts to one category too.
Alex said it would be better that way, and I didn’t really hit me it was till he brought it up.
That auto-tagger sounds pretty cool, mind sharing it with us?
I would like to thank you for all your useful information. I actually look forward to receiving your newsletter to see what I might learn that day.
I’m pretty new and alot of this stuff is confusing to me but its nice to see someone explain it in an easy to understand format.
I also thought tags were just keywords; see, I learned something else new, lol…
Thanks!
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Glad you find Blogussion so informative! Hope to see you around the community more.
I’m glad you found this post useful, Peg and also that you have subscribed to our feed
We are happy to have you on aboard our community, and hope to see you around the discussions in the near future!
I some times forget, in fact I usually forget, thanks for reminding me, I did remember to add the tags today.
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Haha, this article reminded me to start tagging more of the posts here!
No worries, Dan. Don’t be lazy and tag your posts
Good stuff again guys, – interesting to see the thoughts of Wordpress users etc. We tend to use our own bespoke CMS and we’ve recently started looking at how best to incorporate tags and SEO ‘stuff’ into the articles we write for our blog. I’ll be monitoring the affect with page impression data and keyword tracking.
Zulu Internet Marketing’s last blog post..Search Market levels out
Your own CMS? That’s awesome! Have you got a live demo or a blog itself that we can see?
I’d love to check out your custom designed CMS
Over the years, I’ve only run across a couple of custom coded CMS’s and unfortunately just by viewing it’s source; I could see several security holes – hopefully you haven’t got any problems Zulu.
Let us know how your traffic improves over time as you incorporate more and more SEO techniques. I am sure you will see an increase even by implementing the simplest of methods
Janith, thanks for this awesome post.. never really knew about wp tags on posts.. thanks for this one.. i am a fan of your blog now
Thank you for your kind words Jumar!
Glad to have you on aboard and hope to see you getting involved within our loving community
Cheers Janith,
I’m afraid I haven’t got a ‘back-end’ live demo for you to look at but you can see examples of the front end. We’ve got a few sites using it at the moment. Have a look at the following: http://www.zuludigital.co.uk, http://www.zulucreative.co.uk and http://www.bebirmingham.org.uk.
I hope you like! Let me know what you think…and obviously, if you’ve got some thoughts on the various blog articles (on the Zulu sites), feel free to comment!
Zulu Internet Marketing’s last blog post..Search Market levels out
You’ve got something really different going on over there, Zulu.
Props on the coding! I haven’t had the time to properly view how it runs, but just a quick look-over and I can see some really nice features
I’ll definitely check it out within the coming week and drop by a few a comments