Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
5
3.
Enter tags that apply to your post. Scroll down through the post in the edit window and enter
tags as you go. Separate tags with commas; this allows you to enter multiword tags.
Consider all versions of a name or term that someone might enter. For instance, someone search-
ing for Ford might be looking for Ford cars, ex-President Ford, or the Ford of Firth in Scotland.
So enter general terms such as “ford” as well as more specific
terms such as “gerald ford,” “president ford,” or “ford of firth.”
Also consider synonyms and related terms, such as “Richard
Nixon,” who appointed him as vice president, for Gerald Ford;
or “Scotland,” where it's located, for the Ford of Firth.
caution
Be sure to separate tag names
with commas; otherwise,
WordPress will treat two or more
terms as one, which undermines
the usefulness of your tags.
4.
As you enter tags, click the Add button every few terms to clear
the entry line. Click the X next to a previously added tag to
clear it.
The tags you've already added will appear beneath the Add
New Tag area with X's next to them.
tip
News cycles on the Web can
peak in just a few hours—news
appears, people write articles
about the news, people blog on
it, and then everyone is on to the
next thing. If you blog about
news, write and post quickly, and
include tags from the beginning
to help searchers; otherwise,
you'll miss out on the majority
of potential visitors, who will
be searching during the peak of
interest.
5.
Continue reviewing your posting and adding appropriate tags.
6.
When you're done adding tags to your post, click the arrow next
to the Post Tags header to hide the Post Tags area and open up
more room for editing.
As with categories, to really get tags right, you need to be able to
see all your posts and all your tags. The most effective way to do
this is to print out all your posts and a list of your tags and mark up
each post with tags already in the post and related terms that
should serve as tags. As with categorization, this engages your
senses in a way that working onscreen doesn't, and is likely to
lead to the best results.
Managing Tags
WordPress allows top-down management of tags just as it does of categories. The usefulness of
top-down management of tags is not as clear-cut, as tags work a lot better if they're right from the
beginning. However, cleaning up your tags might help you better understand what your blog is
really about and inspire new posts that take you and your site visitors further into topics of interest.
One temptation in managing tags is to amalgamate tags into fewer terms. This is good if it elimi-
nates obscure terms that no one uses and strengthens links to more popular terms. However, part
of the joy of the Web is its support for even the narrowest interests. Don't eliminate pathways that
might serve a small number of people very well, even if most people in the public at large wouldn't
know what a given tag means (or what you and your “insider” site visitors mean by the way you
use it) in a million years.
