Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
5
What determines whether you've done well in tagging your posts? Tags exist for people using a
search engine and for your blog visitors to find your posts. So tags are done well if people searching
for a topic find your posts when they should; that is, when the posts are relevant to their search
topic.
Relevance, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Most of us putting things up on the Web want
more: more visitors, more pageviews, more time spent by people on our site.
Visitors to sites, especially blogs, want either of two things. The first, and main goal, is quick
answers or quick help. People using the Web are often very task-oriented and search in a quick,
twitchy way for specific results. This still leaves room, though, for serendipity—finding a blog post
that's interesting, funny, or enlightening, but that doesn't necessarily help complete a specific task.
If you write your posts well, they'll be both useful and interesting. If you achieve this balance, you'll
help task-oriented people complete their tasks, while at the same time brightening the day of those
who are more open to serendipity.
Tags should help with both. Tags should answer two main questions:
•
What would this post help someone do?
Answering this
question helps generate tags for people who are research-
ing a given topic, such as financial scams or the feeding
habits of killer whales. Tags of this sort tend to be nouns
mentioned in your post, such as proper names of people and
specific things mentioned in the post.
•
What makes this post interesting?
Answering this ques-
tion helps you identify what's special about your post, what
makes it different from other resources out there, such as
company websites, Wikipedia pages, and so on. Tags of this
sort tend to be adjectives that describe your post but might
not appear in it, such as
funny
or
comprehensive
. Tags of
this sort might also be nouns that don't appear in your post,
such as larger categories that the things mentioned in your
posts belong in:
mass delusions
for financial scams or
mammals
for a post about killer whales.
note
Managing tags for your posts
is both very similar to manag-
ing categories and, arguably,
less important. Therefore, this
section is somewhat abbrevi-
ated compared with the previ-
ous section, “Putting Your
Posts in Categories.” Please
review the section on cate-
gories as well as this section to
understand in detail the rela-
tionship between categories
and tags and how best to
manage both.
Tags are the wave of the future. Google became the leading search
engine, and a major corporation by any measure, through its
unmatched support for free-form searching. Tags are your bid to
make your posting accessible to exactly this kind of free-form
search.
tip
You can learn quite a bit about
your own blog by looking at its
tag cloud, a list of the tags
used in your blog, with the
most used appearing largest
and most centrally. You might
be surprised by what's impor-
tant and what's missing.
