Tags

DesertRat · #1 03-21-2009, 06:50 PM

Could someone explain "tags" again? Has someone seen a direct correlation between traffic when using tags and not?

soad524 · #2 03-21-2009, 09:45 PM

according to the wordpress docs a tag "Refers to micro-categories for your blog, similar to including index entries for a page"

read the whole thing here http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts

**sremington** · #3 03-21-2009, 09:58 PM

Everything on the internet gets archived. Not just from where you are but from anything and everything that reads your material such as search engines.

These search engines, bookmarking, and social sites may read your feed and then it wonders what to do with it. Well the purpose of the Internet is to take all this information and store it away in topics, also known as tags. The reason for this is to provide a service to people seeking out information. They know people search the Internet all day long by keywords and terms and so everything they search for they want it to be broken down into easy categories for the searcher.

When you personally tag an article, you are helping these services that come along so that when they read your article, not only are they pulling off keywords from the page but they put a certain emphasis (validity) in "TAGS".

You may write an article about deer hunting so when you are done you tag it as such with key words. The best thing to do is envision why someone would be interested in your article and how they might best find it. Add in those keywords you think people might do a search for.

It's a win/win/win situation for you, search engine service, and the browser...

DesertRat · #4 03-22-2009, 12:48 AM

But don't the search engines catalog key words, without the tags?

soad524 · #5 03-22-2009, 02:16 AM

In my blog at least the tags I use are not used as keywords, in fact they don't show up anywhere with in the page source.

**sremington** · #6 03-22-2009, 09:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DesertRat

But don't the search engines catalog key words, without the tags?

Yeah they do. They are highly sophisticated. If you don't tag it's not the end of the world. But it won't hurt. I think there are other programs on the net that use tags more frequently like technorati etc... There are widgets you can place on your blog sidebar that have your most active tags. People can search your blog according to popular tags etc.