Tagging is an important part of blogging. Think of tags, just like categories, as an addition to the main navigation menu. As your blog grows it is very easy for a sparkling article to get lost. The ‘latest posts’ widget only allows you to list up to the last 15 posts that have been published (there is a hack for this if you want to get your hands dirty and display more than 15).
By adding tags to your posts, you are offering your readers the opportunity to find other posts that are related to the post they are reading. This form of cross navigation is an excellent way to keep people on your blog.
Tag wisely
I have just been through a tag clean up process on this blog and managed to get 600 tags down to 150. How? I removed all of the one word tags – words such as ‘development’, ‘reading’, ‘directory’. They must have meant something at the time of writing, but when I look at the word in the cold light of day it doesn’t really say very much. I also deleted a lot of tags that were in the singular format when a plural was also used; ‘plugin’ and ‘plugins’ for example.
I spent a few minutes trying to find a plugin that would allow me delete unused tags. In the end I gave up and logged into phpMyAdmin and manually deleted the unused and unwanted tags.
What makes a tag, a good tag?
At least two words. Try to use at least two words in your tags whenever possible. A tag such as ‘website development’ or ‘project development’ has much more meaning than ‘development’. Using one word tags is perfectly acceptable, and indeed required in certain cases, but giving your tags more meaning will help your readers find the content they want and will stop the backend of your blog from being too cluttered.
Where, on a post, do you find tags?
Many WordPress (and other) themes include POSTMETADATA at the bottom or top of each post. This data often includes the date the post was published, the name of the author, the post category and a list of tags associated with the post.
However, some themes do not have tags. This is purely down to the choice of the person who created the theme.
In WordPress this is the code used to generate tags:
<?php the_tags('Tags:', ', ', '<?br />'); ?>
It is usually used in single.php
If you have never taken much interest in tagging, next time you are reading a blog, have a little look to see how the tags are being used and how it helps with navigation. Some sites use 20 plus tags for each post, some use a handful. The choice is purely personal, but, I would suggest you use as many as you feel relevant.
