Don’t Forget To Use Tags While Blogging

Don’t Forget To Use Tags While Blogging

I’m writing this post for two reasons- The first of which is to explain why tags are beneficial, and secondly because I forgot to do it on one of my blogs until last December as I didn’t feel they would benefit that blog and just had to manually add tags to about 700 posts today. I’ll get to that second part later. Now onto Tags. Tags, in the blogging world, are keywords used to describe various posts that are usually shown with the post itself. They are able to help with allowing your reader to know what an article is about, SEO, and helping to find related content.

Why Tags Are Important For Blogs

There are many reasons one could argue tags are important for blogs- if done correctly. The first of which would be in terms of Search Engine Optimization. Using tags allows for building more internal links within a site itself. Though I would highly suggest following the rule of only using 3-5 tags per post as using too many can remove this from being beneficial.

Another benefit from using tags into your posts is to expand the ways that users can interact with your site. If they prefer using tags as how to find related topics this is a great and easy feature to add in. With the built in system in most blogging software now you can also add in a Tag Cloud. By Wiki’s description tag clouds are- “a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used typically to describe the content of web sites. They are helpful to find content by topic as well as show what topics you are writing the most about. Many plugins that allow you to show related posts on your blog from each post also require to have tags in place to work efficiently.

What Happens When You Don’t Use Tags And Want To

Well for a blog that’s been around for 2 years, updated daily, and wanting to hand pick which tags each post had? About 5 hours to update the 700 odd posts that were on the site itself. Think of all that time wasted which wouldn’t have been had I spent another 30 seconds per post while making them originally. So if you are thinking about not using tags on your site and there is even a chance that you will use them later- do so now. In the long run it till save you a lot of time and mind numbing correcting of older posts.

Tagged as: Blogging, Tags, Tips