The Benefits of Tagging Your Posts

Recently, we at TalkPrice.net have been wondering about the effect tagging our posts may have on our blog. I have decided to take this research into my hands, and I hope to pass on this knowledge to everybody who is interested in this same topic.

There’s not much prerequisite knowledge needed to understand what I’m talking about when I say “tagging” a post, but just in case: if you use WordPress or any other service, the VAST majority will allow you to tag your post. In WordPress, the place where you enter your tags is right under the post itself.

1) WHY SHOULD I TAG?
The simplest answer to give is probably just “why not?” I mean, it takes about 30 seconds to tag your post, so even if it has minimal benefits, what do you have to lose? I can promise you this: there will be NO negative benefits if you tag your posts. If that’s enough of a reason for you to tag your posts, feel free to skip to the “HOW DO I TAG MY POST” section. However, if you’re still not convinced, I’ll introduce you to some of the positive benefits of tagging. Some of the more notable ones include;

• Increased Traffic! As young bloggers, our main struggle is attaining more traffic. Tagging our posts has helped out greatly. A large portion of our traffic comes from Technorati, BlogCatalog, and Google searches. How do these sites link to us? Well, people search for something they are looking to find out, our post pops up on their browsers, and they click on it - giving us some traffic. Hopefully, our posts are up to their standards and they enjoy it and subscribe. If they don’t, at least it adds to our traffic count. Google operates a bit differently, as it is a search engine for websites, and will be discussed in more detail in the future in a post about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). On the other hand, Technorati and BlogCatalog are made primarily to give readers easy access to many blogs, and help them search for what they want to read about. The way these services work is actually mainly through the tags - these sites have a “spider” that searches through the blogs signed up with them, and they search through the URL’s and the tags. I don’t think they actually search through the content. This was our original problem - we signed up for Technorati but noticed we didn’t get much traffic from there. Then, we began tagging our posts and it was much better.
• More Loyal/Converted Viewers! Earlier, we published a post about the importance of converting viewers. Now, think for a minute - if somebody gets to your post by searching for either the title or a tag of the published post, they’ll probably actually read the post, and maybe subscribe because they are interested in the niche in which you post. This is different from either self-referring or Google, where some people happen to stumble to your blog because of the name of the blog itself. For example, when you post on forums/other blogs asking people to visit your site, many of the people will view your site once, and then forget about it. However, if the reader is actually interested in what you wrote, it’d work out much better overall.

2) HOW SHOULD I TAG MY POST?

Sadly, this is a field I am not quite an expert in myself. Although I’m reading a lot about it online, I’m getting the majority of my info from “trial and error” and personal experience. Let’s say the list of words you want in your tag is: “Benefits Tagging Your Post Information Help Tag.” Here are a few pointers on the best and worst ways to tag this, that hopefully you will be able to apply to your own posts.

• A common rookie mistake is saying “hmm, well, if I just separate every word by a comma then if someone searches for ‘Benefits of Tagging Your Post’ my site will pop up.” While this is a good idea, there’s very little actuality in it. I believe Technorati searches by default search for exact words unless your blog has a very high influence (Technorati’s ranking system) rating, so if somebody searches for “Benefits” or “Tagging” then your post will pop up, but unless you create a specific tag “Benefits of Tagging,” your post will not pop up if someone searches for that.
• I’m actually not sure which operators, like or, and, if, of, etc. Technorati ignores in these searches, so I’d recommend creating one tag for each, so one tag “Benefits of Tagging” and one “Benefits Tagging” just to be safe. There’s no limit (I’ve encountered) in how many tags your post can have.
• In Technorati and BlogCatalog searches, the order of the results depends on the relevance and, more importantly, influence. Therefore, if you write a post about Tagging Blogposts and tag your post with only “Tagging Posts” and your blog doesn’t have a ton of traffic, you probably won’t get much help from Technorati, as there are tons of blogs with more influence with the same tag. However, if you also include a specific tag, like “Benefits of Tagging Blog Posts” AS WELL AS “Tagging Posts” you will probably get more help. This is because there are a select few people who search for “Benefits of Tagging Blog Posts” and your blog will appear earlier. Basically, try to include specific AND vague tags.
• Have you ever noticed how on YouTube videos, sometimes people include the same tag 20 times? For example, I was watching a Disturbed music video, and the tag was “Disturbed, Disturbed, Disturbed, Disturbed” about 30 times. This is because this will trick the YouTube search engine into thinking your video is more relevant than someone else’s. Technorati functions very similarly. Repeating the same word, or very similar wording, is generally a good idea. Never choose between two tags you like - include them both! I’m yet to run into a problem where I have tagged my post too many times. Try to “overtag” the most relevant word or the word you feel people search most often if you can. (I’m pretty sure this will help.)
• Try to include every word of your title as an individual word AS WELL AS in a phrase. I know I said earlier not to separate every, word, of, your, tag, like, this, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing, as long as you ALSO include specific tags. Again, this will add to the relevance.
• If the list of words you want to tag is relatively small, don’t be afraid to just include every possible combination (well, be reasonable). For example, here is what the list of tags may be if the list of words you want to have is ‘Benefits Tagging Your Post Information Help Tag;’ “Benefits, Benefits of Tagging, Tagging Help, Benefits of Tagging Information, Help with Tagging,” and so on and so forth.

Pretty much, don’t be afraid to include useless tags, and more is more is more, no matter how you look at it. There are REALLY no detrimental factors of using too many tags, while there are numerous positives. I’d recommend tagging every single post, if you want more traffic. If you want to give any tips on tagging, by all means I’m open for constructive criticism.