Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

What do your post tags say about your site, and do they help the visitor find what they are seeking?

Using a related posts feature can help with internal link building; however, many WordPress users complain that no articles are being shown. When one person was griping about this fact, I went to her site to see what was happening. I noticed a few things about the posts, and I tried to help her, but she decided not to listen. When going to some other blogs, I found the same issues cropping up yet again. I decided to compare sites that were successful in guiding users to other posts, and sites which do not do so well. A main problem that I found involved how the articles were tagged.

The problem with tags

    We have a powerful tool with the tagging feature, but we can abuse it. Tags are placed on articles to help identify the content of the piece. I think most people associate them with keywords, so they place all of their keywords in the tags. That was the first problem: inappropriate tags. If your post is about apples, and you place the word “oranges” in the tags, because you are trying to rank well for that term, you failed. Another issue that arose was having about twenty or so tags for each article. There are differing opinions, but about twelve words works out to a nice size. Notice that I said twelve words, not phrases. The next issue had to do with branding. A few years ago, I saw many bloggers trying to build a brand image through their posts and in their tags. This led to people including their name or other company information in their tags. I started to imitate that trend, because I thought that it would help people find my posts. Your blog should already have a brand incorporated into other elements of the theme, so this does not need to be part of the tag. I recently went back cleaning up those branding elements from my tags. Another main issue that I witnessed was having a sentence as a tag. Will this sentence be used as a tag again? Or even a phrase? One way to discover new posts is through related tags. You will hardly ever write the same sentence again; you might write the same phrase. I noticed that the better sites typically kept their tags to one or two words- three was only used when appropriate.Lastly, I saw tags which tried to cover every possibility of the word. For example, dog, dogs, dawg, dawgs, canine, and canines could be used to cover all the possible scenarios with that word. Search engines and visitors are smart enough that you do not have to be concerned with trying to catch every version of a word.

How tags influence architecture

    When cleaning up my tagging from posts that I wrote two and three years ago, I discovered that the architecture of my site improved. With your tags, you are making connections. These threads link articles, ideas, categories. You are building up a scheme of how information is structured. I read a line which compared the posts on your site to products in a grocery store. Peanut butter is a good example. Where do you place it? In a section with different spreads, or do you locate it by the bread? Obviously peanut butter belongs in a grocery store, but you have to place it in a logical place for the consumer to find it. You may discover that there are connections which you had not considered. With fewer tags that matched the post instead of keywords I wanted, the number of related posts went up.
    By giving more thought to how I tag, I created a new way for users to interact with my site. Think about how you structure information and how your visitors may wish to organize it. You set up categories, which you can consider like a library classification system. The consumer may wish to relate to these posts through a category; however, they may be interested in a particular concept wich transcends a category. If you go to your local library, you will find business books under sections for business, computers, math, biographies, and maybe others. With tagging, you create a thread that a visitor who is interested in the term “business” in all of its forms.
    There are various tools that will help you choose a tag to include. These are good to examine, but you need to be the filter. Make the post or page focus on a topic, and not on everything you wish to accomplish, and you will improve the visitor experience.

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