Jul 3

Tags - Simple strategies to create effective tags

Posted by writer | Social Media - an online mindset shift »

Tagging
Tags are the words to describe your blogs, videos, posts, book marks or whatever it is that you are tagging. The concept of tags has been with us since time immemorial - where humans like to place information in chunks and categories. In the blogging and online world too, we use tags to make it easier for us and others to find information. If you are running a company or event blog, we’d advise you to spend a few minutes every time you write a new post to add relevant tags to it. This little step goes a long way to routing interested traffic to yourself.

Tags are basically the meta-data that goes into search functions. That makes them important tools for bringing in relevant traffic to your site. So using them properly can be an effective marketing tool for attracting your targeted customers or readers from the internet. Almost all internet users use search engines - you just need to figure out a way to be visible when they’re searching for things that are relevant to your business. Follow these best practices;

Tagging best practices:
A few important things to keep in mind regarding tags are that;

- they should be short; preferably single words if possible

- they should be simple; in the easiest possible language

- they should be memorable; simple memorable words are searched more often

- they should be relevant to the content of the site/blog

- don’t limit yourself by being too specific. E.g. write “fund raiser” instead of “charity fund raiser concert” or write “outdoor event” instead of “outdoor pool party for teens”.

- If comma separated use capitals to start each new word to make it easier for the search spiders to identify the different words.

- If asked to space separated tags its best to start each new phrase with lower case lettering and each new word in a phrase with a capital letter without spaces. “leavingTheSpace” “toSeperateEachNewPhrase” you want to tag like so.

Just remember to focus on terms people search for. Go over your content, find the things that are relevant to your content and use them as well. For example if your article is about wedding parties, also add tags to “engagement”, “wedding ring”, “wedding cake”, “wedding planning”, etc. However, make sure you limit yourself to a maximum of 6-8 keyword tags so as not to dilute the tagged word density of the post. Too many tags have a negative effect in the search rankings.

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