INSIGHTS | September 26, 2013
Tag the Smart Way: Improving Your Post's Presence
So you‘ve gone online, made a blog or Tumblr for your brand, and you’re starting to create original content. The content is there but you’re not seeing as many viewers as you’d like. Analytics show you’re getting traffic – but not a lot of people are going deeper into the site.
Enter the tag. Most blogging platforms allow for tags (short keywords used to describe the content). With most Wordpress or Tumblr themes, tags are also displayed on the page, usually below or beside the post content. Tags are used in a few ways, with the lesser way being users clicking them to find like results for other posts with the same tag. It’s a great feature, but not always utilized.
The second and more common way is that tags help search engines find and index your content properly. These tags help external search engines like Google understand the content on the page and help the internal search engine as well. Google has ways to try and figure out the content of a post but the search engine on your blog isn’t nearly as advanced… and tags can help users find more relevant content.
So what’s a good tag?
Think about how you use the web. If you’re searching a site for a particular term, most likely you’ll use the least amount of words with the least amount of punctuation possible. While a tag “Walt Disney World Tips-and-Tricks” can help you index your site, no one will actually search for such a long term.
Think like a user
Try shorter terms like “#Disney World” and “#Disney”. Many users are unsure what to do with apostrophes and hyphens when searching, so consider tagging without punctuation. Joke tags like “#I can’t believe I ate that whole taco platter last night” might make a post entertaining, but won’t actually help with searching.
Be consistent
If you tag all of your photo gallery posts with the tag “gallery”, then the tag search and tag results pages will include all of your content. You will have missing content if you use “photo gallery” sometimes and “gallery” other times. Use the same terms when possible. Some blogging platforms will allow you to restrict the creation of tags to administrators.
Be descriptive
Use terms that help describe your content for better indexing. A new camera that has Wi-Fi built in should take a tag for that feature. Tagging a picture of Yellowstone National Park with just “#photo” isn’t as helpful as multiple tags such as “#photo #yellowstone #geyser”.
Learn the platform
Wordpress, Twitter and Facebook work with single-word tags and no spaces, such as “#disneyworld”. Tumblr allows for spaces in tags, like “#disney world”. Learn what your options are, and look at similar posts to see how they are tagged. Tags in Twitter take up your 140 characters and need to be conserved. Tumblr has a separate tagging interface that allows for a lot more tags.
Planning for the deep web
A properly tagged post can keep resurfacing indefinitely. I have a fairly deep Tumblr site with thousands of posts and the strangest posts can resurface from months ago because of proper tags. Make content easier for people to find and they will keep finding it far into the future. This will help your content continue to be found long after it has left the front page or the top of the feed.