Tagging for SEO
Tagging lets you cross-promote content based on your own knowledge of the topics you’re writing about. Tagging lets you associate content that is seemingly diverse but is itself a sort of horizontal channel. And with tagging you can associate one piece of content to many other topics.
When I work with authors to improve their search engine optimization the first thing we address is their information architecture. They need to understand how the content they write relates to the section, channel and site they’re writing for. They need to understand keywords and the keyword families that they’re writing about. Once they understand keywords and the outline form of a site they’re able to conform to its linearity.
But blogs and websites aren’t all about being trapped in a vertical.
Enter tagging.
The outline structure of a blog or website belies the realities of content – web content doesn’t always conform and shouldn’t always conform to a rigid map.
Content needs cross-promotion. Content needs to relate to other content even when it’s not within the same immediate channel, product line or site.
Tag Cloud for SEO
Tagging lets you do this. Tagging lets you cross-promote content based on your own knowledge of the topics you’re writing about. Tagging lets you associate content that is seemingly diverse but is itself a sort of horizontal channel. And with tagging you can associate one piece of content to many other topics.
What is tagging? Tagging is associating one or more keywords with a post or article to add it to another layer type of relevant navigation.
How do I use tagging? Take this post for example. I’m putting it in the SEO Web Design category, but also tagging it with ‘wordpress‘, ‘tag‘, ‘writing‘, ‘keywords‘ and ‘navigation‘. These are 5 new categorizations that this post is naturally associated with, but these categories aren’t located in my site’s navigation.
How don’t I use tagging? Easy. I don’t repeat the category name in the tag, I don’t tag every post with every possible keyword. And I don’t use more than 6 tags per post unless those keywords are really relevant to the topic. Check my post Top 10 WordPress Plugins You Need Everyday for an example of this.
So how do search engines see tagging? That’s a good question. A lot of people like to try to prevent search engines from spidering their tags and tag archive pages to reduce saturation on their posts. My opinion is that I prefer to show the search engines now my content interrelates. I’m going out on a limb here, but I think it’s better to treat the search engines as humans and not as super-organized, super-linear entities.
Does tagging work? Yes it does. Tagging is a great way to quickly display topic areas to your visitors. It shows the areas that you write about, and acts as a search engine that quickly drives visitors into your excellent content.
If you’re not tagging now you should definitely experiment with it on your site. Measure the results with your web analytics and see for yourself if tagging benefits your site.
