Jan

Tags & Tagging Content – Why and how ?

tagging

Introducing the TAG world:

In the past 3 years we have seen a dramatic change in many websites, almost every big website now incorporates a tagging system in which each piece of content is related to a couple or more “tags”.

Tags are more like a way of defining the scope of the written information in a which one can read these tags and understand most of the content’s (video/written) topic.

Because tagging has became so widespread we can see it nowadays in every social or content based site, if you own a website and have content in it – you may want to insert the related tags to that page.

In fact Tagging content is so important you can even see it take part in the world of SEO, under the header of HTML meta data – a great SEO tip is to add the meta data which defines the tagging for your website. I must say – that many CMS like the one which I’m using in my blog (word press), don’t really require you to define tags to a post you publish, but the option to do that exists and you can gain great SEO value out of spending a minute or two and defining the tags for the content you just spent your time writing.

Bad Tags, Good Tags:

Because tags have became so widely spread, they have been also misunderstood and misused. you might wander up many sites these days who either define more than 30 tags per page or define a lot of tags who do not relate to the content’s subject in any matter. this mainly happens because of two reasons:

1. People want to get traffic from certain search engine used keywords, therefor they are used and defined as tags in many content websites – even if the content barely related to these tags.

2. Over Tagging – the content just relates to too much information and to scroll down the content page or to watch that video takes about an hour, this makes it hard for only defining the content in a couple of words and makes many websites post huge lists of keywords about a related content page.

The Solution(s) – The right way to implement tagging on the web:

1. Even if it took you 2 hours to write / build your content – use only 5-10 keywords to define it.

2. Check now that all your web resources use the <Meta> keyword when displaying web pages with the right keywords intact, also check the syntax and spelling whithin the code you write.

3. Remove hot keywords which you want to create search engine traffic from content that does not relate to these keywords, instead create new content that does relate to these keywords and drive the traffic there. (this will also reduce the bounce rate - By taking the bouncing visitors to a page they can really find the content which was searched for)

4. Write your keywords on the web page itself and use links to make search engines understand they relate to pages on your website, if you use a CMS like word press you can enable the sidebar which displays your keywords.

5. Think and write on paper your keywords before even writing the post / content – That way your content will relate even more to these keywords and you’ll found yourself focusing more on these keywords while creating the content.

6. Do a web search for each tag and check what sites which are using this keyword are doing to integrate the keyword on the page, learn from the first results and you’ll learn from the best (watch your time and don’t spend too much on this, you might end up looking too much what other people are doing and less time creating content yourself – this will hurt your production, I suggest time limitation on this task).

7. Use keyword analysis programs to fetch new keywords for your content, you can even check the search volume on these keywords in a tool such as the Google AdWords keywords tool (and you don’t need any google / AdWords account to commence your searches).

Resources:

1. writing keyword meta tags:

2. Google’s keyword tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal