Do You Tag Your Blog Posts?

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So you’ve just crafted a great blog post and you’re about to publish it for all to see, but have you thought about how it might get found, not only outside of your blog, but within your blog? This is where tagging (& categorising) comes in.

Tags are basically keywords that you attach to your blog post, so for example, if your blog is about cooking and the subject of your blog post is ‘coq au vin’, then the tags you may want to attach would be as follows: coq au vin, chicken, French recipes, French food, etc

This will enable your post to be found if anyone searches within your blog. Most blogging platforms allow for tags (or keywords), which include Blogger, Typepad and WordPress.

To ensure your blog posts are correctly categorised, which allows further ways for visitors to your blog to find the posts they’re interested in, make sure each post is placed within a category. So, continuing with my example, your blog post all about ‘coq au vin’ may be placed within a category that could be ‘French Recipes’. Typepad and WordPress allow categories to be created, but not Blogger, so if your blog is hosted on Blogger, you need to make sure you tag each blog post.

Sometimes when you visit blogs, you may see groups of keywords together within the navigation of the blog, with some of these keywords displayed bigger than others. This is known as a ‘tag cloud’ (see above image) and gives the visitor a way of seeing which tags are the most popular. Clicking on one of these words within the tag cloud will lead you to a list of the blog posts containing those tags (or keywords).

For further reading on tag clouds, read ‘Tag Clouds Gallery: Examples and Good Practices’ on Smashing Magazine.

About Sam

Sam McArthur is an internet marketing consultant with 12 years in the industry. She helps professional service businesses with their internet marketing strategy, helping them to see significant results from their online marketing activities, particularly within the search engines. She also consults on the latest internet tools, technology and best practice techniques.