Tag Archive for: Tags

Most bloggers know how important tagging is. Tags allow you to retain a similar structure across almost all blogging platforms, unlike categories. What may be surprising however, is the amount of freedom tags give bloggers also leads to them being badly used.

With that in mind, let’s start at the top and explore what tags really are and what benefits they offer. Then we can cover how to use them properly.

What are Tags?

As one blogger describes them, “tags are your index words.” That is to say, tags allow users to easily find articles based on keywords. If a reader finds a post on your website about content marketing, they can easily find more about the topic on your site. This helps readers become more informed and spend more time on your site.

How to Use Tags Effectively

The most common issue with tags are over or under usage. You want to use enough tags to cover the relevant points people may be looking for, but you don’t want to overdo it. Sufyan bin Uzayr uses the example of tagging an article about the recent conflict in Syria to illustrate this idea. If you just tag the article “Syria” and “Middle East” you are missing out on a few important opportunities. However, if you use redundant tags such as “War in Middle East”, “Arab Revolt” and “Arab Spring” all on the same article, you are overdoing it. The key is to try not to repeat yourself.

SEO and Tags

Lately some bloggers have been suggesting that using tags in certain ways will increase your ranking somehow. This is clearly too good to be true, but that doesn’t mean you should write tags off immediately. If you index your tags efficiently, they hold their merit, but they aren’t ever going to be the magic potion some are suggesting.

Most importantly, tags are for your visitors to help with navigation, but using them improperly isn’t going to help anyone. Trying to keep navigation organized reflects in your SEO performance.

 

Implementing tags to measure traffic and visitor behavior on your site is a great way to learn about your audience and improve your site. But, managing those tags can be cumbersome and time-consuming. As Joab Jackson reports for ComputerWorld, that’s why Google recently launched ‘Tag Manager’ to streamline and simplify the process.

Much like AdWords and Analytics, Google Tag Manager is easy to use and it’s completely free. After embedding a small section of code to your site, Google will take care of providing appropriate tags for each page.

Tags that overlap can slow down your site’s load time and potentially lose you visitors. Google employs a way to eliminate that possibility and, of course, offers many ways for you to customize your experience.

Though Google is not the first to offer a tag management system, the number of websites that use one is expected to skyrocket in the coming months.