Who needs Tags?
Here’s a best practice I can already share: As you start building your site, build with relevant tags.
I’m breaking away from my focus on the why’s and what-for’s of blogging for small businesses — all things I believe you have to be certain of before starting a blog — to look at one the tools of blogs: tags. You just can’t blog for long without a bit of insight into tags.
At first, I have to admit, I thought tags were just a formality. A nicety. Even an extra. But, oh, they are so not extra. Tags are the signposts of the blogosphere. Tags are some of the prime markers that search engines look for as they roam the Web seeking info for the customer who has just typed in keywords for your business and pushed the search button.
They’re your blog’s metatags, keywords that identify the content on your blog. To me as a content producer, the big difference between blog tags and Website metatags is simply where I put them. On a Website, I’ll have a list of keywords (metatags) that sit in the html code on every page that I want a search engine to land on. In my blog, those metatags are upfront as well as in the code. You’ll find them at the end of my entries.
And when you post a comment, you’ll see a list of categories to check off. These are your tags; by checking which ones apply, you’re flagging down the search engines. Oh, here’s another point: on my blog, the categories are also the tags.
Just for fun, check out Technorati, one of the biggest blog search engines of the moment. There’s a cool tag cloud on the right. You can tell immediately which tags are getting the most clicks; they’re the ones in bold and bigger than the rest. And then go to Del.icio.us to see how they list their top tags.
The next step is to do a bit of research to determine which tags in your field are coming up most often. Very simply, you want to have those tags on your site so you come up, too. The first thing I noticed is that my inclination to put blogging as a primary tag on my site was not so well-thought-out. Blog and blogs came up more heavily for me than blogging. So, I’ll be switching out my blogging tags to blog. But I’m also rethinking that one: do I need a blog tag on a blog? I’m also noticing that customers are typing in content producer more often when searching for professionals in my field than online content.
Tags are just the snow dusting the top of the iceberg when it comes to optimizing your site. But here’s a best practice I can already share: As you start building your site, build with relevant tags.
Later, when I get around to search engine optimization (that SEO you hear so much about), I’ll look into this subject in more depth. (I have to keep reminding myself that this is a work-in-progress, and stopping myself from jumping ahead.) When it’s time, I’ll be calling on some of my SEO expert pals to fill me in on that end of it. It’s a subject that can be as complex as you’re ready to take it. Or, IMHO, need to take it.