Tagging Your Blog Posts With The Right Tags Means More, Higher Quality Traffic.

Tagging has been with us for some time now, and has done a lot of good for bloggers and blog readers. Tags take searching to the next step of finding. Searching means typing in words and getting results based on pages containing those words. That's not bad, but when you compare it to finding pages that people have associated with those words, the difference between searching and finding becomes huge.

Why You Should Start Tagging If You aren't Yet.

Tagging your blog posts does two great things for your blog.

First it allows you to push your blog posts to tag pages across the web. Each tag you assign will put your blog post on another tag page with another listing leading both readers and search engines to the post. It's free advertising that these tag listing pages actually want to give you. All you have to do to get these listings is assign the tags to your posts.

Secondly it helps organize your blog's content into manageable, findable sections. When you assign a tag to your post you are telling people that this content has a high level of relevance to this tag (word). This means that in addition to searching for words that may appear in your post, people can also find your post through thematically related words.

How To Get Tags Into Your Post

The overwhelming majority of blogging software and blogging services today have tagging built in to them, or at the least available as an extension or plugin. If you are using one of these, you can simply assign tags to your posts in the prescribed manner.

If your blogging platform does not natively offer support for tagging you will have to hand code your tags into your blog posts. This isn't as easy, but isn't that hard either, and is well worth the extra effort. To hand code you tags you will first need to select a tag directory like TechnoratiTechnorati pioneered getting tags directly from you blog post into a tag listing page, and is a popular choice for many bloggers even when they could use local tag pages. or del.icio.usWhile del.icio.us is not strictly a blog tagging service, they are an early social bookmarking service with a lot of users and their site structure supports the tag structure required for effective tagging.

Tags are in a technical sense words or phrases that are linked to a tag page with a tag property.

• Tag pages should have addresses that follow the pattern of http://rootdomain.tld/tag/tag-word. The first part of the URL should be familiar to you. it's the domain name of the tag site. Next, there should be a directory named 'tag' and finally there is the final directory which is the text of the tag itself. Note that some sites will separate words in the tag with a '-', some with a '+' and some, like del.ic.ious, do not really recognize multi word tags.
• The tag property which alerts various services and search engines to the fact that a link is a tag is the rel attribute. You will need to use rel="tag" in your link.
• Finally, the anchor text of the link should be the text of the tag.

So a fully formed tag might look like this:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/blog+tagging" rel="tag">blog tagging</a>

Getting The Most Out Of Your Blog Post Tags

I'm going to give you a few of my top tips for getting the most value from your tagging. These are things that I've experimented with and found to work the best.

• Whenever possible use local tag pages and consider setting up unique tag based titles and descriptions for each post for each tag you assign to the article.
• Do some research and determine what tags others have used for similar content. Remember that tags are about finding content, not searching content. By using tags people are already using for similar articles you help them find your content as well.
• Use tags sparingly. At first the temptation is to cram as many tags into a post as you can so that your blog shows up on more listing pages. This is actually a bad idea, though. The more tags you use the further from the core theme of your article they become. Soon you will water down the theme of your post and of your blog, making it harder for people to find you and search engines to categorize your blog.
• Tags should compliment your categories, not compete with them. Your categories should be the broad brush strokes that form the base for the theme of your blog, while the tags hone in and provide a fine detail look into the overall topics of your blog.
• Make sure as many tag list directories as possible know about your tags. Many of them will accept an xmlrpc ping just like the blog feed aggregators do, be sure to ping those that do.
• Create a tag cloud page if your blogging platform allows for it, and also put your tags on your home page. Avoid putting the cloud on all pages, because having all of your tags on a post page will confuse some spiders and make it less obvious what each page is about. This will hurt you both when people search for your content and when they try to find it through tags.

Let Google Suggest Tags For Your Posts

One way to decide what tags to use for your posts that I've been experimenting with and seeing positive results from is to let Google suggest tags for your posts. using this method lets your tags do double duty, not only helping people find your content through tags, but also confirming for Googlebot that your page is about exactly what it thinks it is about. This is very easy to do and I'm providing a step by step guide here.

1. Write your post just as you normally would. Don't think too much about what tags you will use for it yet. Let the flow of the article come out naturally.
2. Copy the entire text of your post.It will be better to do this from the code view of your post rather than the fancy editor. The code view will contain title, alt and heading information that Google is used to seeing, whereas this is all hidden in the WYSISYG editor.
3. Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and click on the "Site-Related Keywords" tab.
4. Click on the link that reads "Or, enter your own text in the box below. (optional)" and paste your post into the box that appears there.
5. Hit the "Get Keywords Button" and wait for Google to return a list of related keywords from the text.

Sometimes this method will alert you to a great tag you hadn't thought of, other times it will let you know that Google agrees with you about what your article is about, and sometimes it just might point out things you need to change to help focus your article on the topic you wanted to write about. In any case, it is a quick and easy way to verify that you are choosing the right tags for your content.

Just be sure to remember that you also want to make sure these tags are the tags people are using to find content like yours as much as possible.

Some More Tagging Tips.

• This article from techsoup on Thirteen Tips For Effective Tagging is really an article on effective tagging for del.icio.us, but there is a lot of good advice there for tagging your blog posts as well.
• In this article at WPDesigner offering Four WordPress and Blog Design Tips Small Potato includes as number one the advice that "Tags are clutter". While I'm not prepared to go that far, I take his point. Too many tags will dilute the theme of your blog over all, and make it more difficult for a search engine to really assign a meaning to a post.
• Three more tagging tips from optiniche. Are you noticing the trend of people telling you that less is more when it comes to assigning tags to your blog posts (and to your bookmarks too)?
• And who better to get tips on tagging than from a bunch of folks like the librarians at Penn State University? As they point out in the article, "All right, we're librarians. We can't resist pointing out that we've organized a lot of information over the past few thousand years, so we have opinions about this kind of thing.".Tagging is often referred to as folksonomy, a form of taxonomy where "the folks" socially pick the vocabulary that describes the relationship between items. Taxonomy is literally "the science of classification" or the "Science of Order" and constitutes a set of controlled vocabulary terms, usually hierarchical, that describe the relationship between things.