Thinking in Tags

If you’re blogging on behalf of a company, it’s often tempting to make your posts as relevant to as wide an audience as possible. This is easily accomplished if you’re willing to take the time to submit the post to Digg, Sphinn and a variety of other news aggregate sites that will up the traffic to the post itself, or at least encourage link-backs and industry discussion. However, there’s a crucial and extremely powerful tool that most people seem to forget to use much of the time, that becomes more valuable the more you use it: tags.

Tags are simple enough – one or two word summaries of the post topic. For example, on this post I’ve gone with “tags” – somewhat obviously – and “tagging posts” as summaries that may seem a little vague, alongside another tag I’ll mention later. What these two tags are doing is instantly, via WordPress, calling attention to anyone looking for information on tags via the WP search engine (you’d be suprised how often it’s used), and later, once traffic builds, through Google, Bing and other search engines.

I’m by no means giving away any secrets – this should be common knowledge, but many businesses are not using it to their full advantage. Much like text adverts, tags are a subtle, smart way of directing people to services, products and of course, blogs, that they may not have otherwise been aware of. They’re passive enough not to shout attention on themselves, and this is important: at no point do you want your business to seem like it’s forcing ideas down the throats of potential customers, or even investors. By tagging everything you say, not only do your regular blog posts begin to crop up more in directories (increasing use of the same tag, for example, makes you a more likely one-meets-all source for information on any given subject), you’re also increasing the amount of people relying on you for information about that subject.

The other thing you’re doing is building a tag cloud, the third tag I’ve used for this post. Your tag cloud, displayed as a widget for example, will be a mess of words and phrases, their font size depending on how often they’re used as tags on your posts. They’re an extremely efficient way of showing your readers what you talk about most. On many of my blogs, company names will crop up in my personal tag clouds quite often – this tells the reader that discussing industry figureheads is a key part of my journalistic agenda. Of course, with company-based blogs, your tag clouds should involve new technologies, business strategies, and tags relating to current events. This is extremely important if you’re looking into publishing blogs on a regular basis – don’t do this if you’re only posting once a month, as over a year only thirty very small font-size tags in the cloud will look somewhat half-hearted.

The most important thing to remember is to tag honestly – don’t tag your posts with topics you think will get you the most hits. If you’re a florist posting about the Chelsea Flower Show, don’t tag your post with “Johnny Depp.” I’m sure he’d be flattered, honestly he would. But the fact remains that people will come to your site looking for information on Depp only to be disappointed, which builds you a reputation for being a bit of a tag-liar (newly invented phrase, one would imagine, but it serves the purpose well enough). This happens a lot on YouTube, though it’s decreased in recent months. Click on “more info” and you’ll end up with hundreds of words linked to popular video searches, not even 10% of them related to the video you’re currently watching. It’s spam, and it’s unfair on people who want access to the right information – other businesses may be taking potential traffic figures from you with this method; don’t do the same to them. Tag lots, blog often, and tag honestly. These three tenets will take you further than you think.