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tagging for your blogOne of the hardest things for any of us to do sometimes is to admit that we are doing things wrong. (Except me cause I’m always right. I kid) I’m not quite sure why that is but the best thing to do when you do find out that you’re going down the wrong path is to stop, and quickly correct your course.

Where is this rant coming from, you ask? Well, I’m getting to that. On one of the websites that I help to run, a question kept coming up about how to tag blogs that we posted on the site. My web guy, we’ll call him Pete, (cause its his name) was concerned that we were doing a poor job in tagging these posts and we ended up getting into a deep discussion about if and why tagging posts correctly even matters.

I LIVE for moments like these. Another clear opportunity to not only educate myself but to then, in turn, pass along said knowledge to you wonderful people out there. (win-win) After doing a bit of research, what I found brought me to the “stop and correct” moment I spoke about earlier and a chance to apply my findings to this blog.

Understanding The Taxonomy of a Blog

To really “get” why tagging is important, you have to actually understand a lil sum sum about taxonomies and how information is classified and retrieved on blogs. (but very little, thankfully) The short story goes like this. You have your blog, right? And your blog is like a book. This book has a theme which is what it will primarily be about. For example, this blog would be a most likely be a marketing book which aims to help people who are don’t quite understand online marketing to create and grow their businesses on the internet.

Within that theme, a blog is broken down further into categories. Categories are like the table of contents in a book. A category will tell you what each chapter will be about. (ooooooh. Pretty smooth right? Thank you, thank you. I am an analogy kingpin. Don’t hate). Again, for example, this blog has a number of categories such as blogging, SEO, motivation, web usability, etc. These help to classify the information that one can expect to read which all fall under the overarching marketing theme of the blog. (a heck of a lot easier than just trying to blindly dig through the archives to find info)

The last component in your blog taxonomy would be the “tag.” Tags are like folding the corners of a page in the book so that you can find and reference the information contained on that particular page. Each individual blog post is like a section or page in one of the chapters. Sometimes you don’t want to read the entire chapter. Sometimes you are just need one piece of information about a single topic located in that chapter. Tags help you to find that specific information so it is important that these “pages” are tagged correctly.  I hope that makes sense. (If not you can read more here. If you are a visual learner you can chiggy-check out this cool info-graphic here)

Why is Tagging Important?

This is a good question. To answer it requires some semi-deep thought. I want you guys to think about all the information that is available on the vast “series of tubes” that is the internet. There is a LOT of info out there and it is ever expanding. How do you find specific information? Its usually the search engines like Google. And how do THEY find specific information? Well, they find it by sending their “spiders” or “web crawlers” out to index your site.

The taxonomic structure (including tags) makes it much easier for your informative blog posts to be found and eventually ranked by the search engines. So, it is important to make sure you pick tags that are specific and relevant to the posts that you write.

The Social Bookmarking Effect

How does a search engine (or anyone else for that matter) determine how valuable content is for ranking purposes? It has been widely established that “inbound links” hold tremendous weight. The idea is that if lots of people link to your stuff it HAS to be valuable, right?

How else do people find content online? Well I’ll tell you. (cause honestly, the it’s not worth the suspense) Folksonomies have emerged to help “content consumers” classify and give external value to content. These tools, like social bookmarking sites allow people outside of the actual content creator to add their own tags to things they find online. The search engines are fans of this.

According to a 2007 article in Search Engine Journal:

Bookmarks show how a site is perceived, and when these sites allow voting, they also show the engines or whatever classification system which monitors voting, how people feel about the quality of the site. Furthermore, social bookmarking can introduce a site to the search engines, as in some cases, people may find and bookmark a site or a site’s internal pages before a search engine can find those pages via another form of inbound link.

Monitoring social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Ma.gnolia can help search engines in multiple ways by:

  • Indexing Sites Faster : Humans bookmark sites launched by their friends or colleagues before a search engine bot can find them.
  • Deeper Indexing : Many pages bookmarked are deep into sites and sometimes not as easily linked to by others, found via bad or nonexistent site navigation or linked to from external pages.
  • Measuring Quality : Essentially if more users bookmark a page, the more quality and relevance that site has. A site with multiple bookmarks across multiple bookmarking services by multiple users is much more of an authority than a site with only several bookmarks by the same user.
  • External Meta Data : Users who bookmark sites tag them with keywords and descriptions which add an honest and unbiased definition which is created by the public and not the owner of the site.
  • Co Citation : Social bookmarking sites tend to categorize sites and pages based upon the tags used by humans to describe the site; therefore search algortihms can classify these sites with their peers.
  • Number of Votes : Similar to the number of bookmarks, the more votes a page receives on Digg or Reddit, the more useful that information usually is. If the same page receives multiple votes across multiple social news voting sites, the higher quality the site.
  • Categorization : Like Co Citation, categorization can help define the subject of a site, therefore better helping the engine address searcher intent.

Bringing It All Together

Now that you have some more solid background about tagging, here are some tips to follow when creating tags for your own blog posts:

1) You really don’t need to have a ton of different tags for your posts. You want to make it fairly simple for peeps to not only find your content but to know immediately what your posts are going to be about. The more tags you use, the more likely it is that some of your keywords will be off topic.

2) Use the same tags…often. This is a tip that I will be using going forward.  When you write a post under a certain category you will find that many topics are pretty similar. That’s OK. Just use the same tags you’ve used before, it’ll be fine. (Hey, you learn something new every day) Too many different tags will dilute and again tend to stray from the main point of the post.

3) Understand the different rules for tagging on your blogging platform (Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous) as well as social bookmarking sites (Del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon). For the tag “social media” some platforms require no space between the words (socialmedia). On some, it doesn’t matter (social media). Some require commas between different tags (marketing, blogging) and some don’t (marketing blogging). Know the rules!

All in all proper tagging makes it easier for both humans and search engines to find your stuff online. Take the time to get this right now. It will definitely pay off for you in the long run. I will surely be putting this information to use as well!

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