It has become alarming to see some great sites tagging excessively, so I thought I would cover this issue without pinpointing anyone in particular.
It is important to not put so many tags in your posts. Like keywords, the density should be low. For sites that contain a lot of posts that talk about the same subjects, but not exactly be the same, it might be best to use something different than another post.
Though I have no definite number that is generally acceptable, you can use tools like Website Grader to see if you are excessively tagging. For Blondish.net, I use anywhere between 1 to 5 tags. Considering my front page has 8 articles, my front page could have a collective tag number of between 8 to 40. Obviously, 40 is a lot, so I have to try to make sure the tags I use are fewer than that.
Now, keep in mind tagging and keywords are not exactly the same. Tagging is just another way to organize an article in your’s sites navigational system. However, sometimes the search engines do pick up these tags. In fact Lorelle, writes a great article even way back in 2006 that I think is still quite relevant called Keywords Versus Tags.
Although there are great SEO plugins that can help for your site, make sure you are applying the same concept in using keywords there too. This is where you can use a few complex keywords, rather than use the tagging system to stuff words in.
So as an overview:
– Make sure to use only a few tags per article
– Be clear with your tags
– Optional: Use a SEO plugin if you want to write more complex keywords, rather than rely on the default tag system.
What is your policy on tagging?
Hi, I wanted to check out Lorelle's blog for quite some time because I hear a lot of good things about it. I see the last post was from December. Is the blog still active? Do you think she will post another article soon?
I'm not very knowledgeable about SEO even though I read tons of articles about it. I used the Website Grader tool but I wouldn't recommend it because many people that used it had their Twitter accounts hacked into last month. I was one of them. There was a tweet sent out about Biz Stone with a link to a site that had nothing to do with the attack. I think they have cleared up all of the problems now but its sad that spammers can mess up a good thing.
I'll keep reading your blog and maybe some of this SEO stuff will sink in my thick head one day. I appreciated the tips.
@Ileane
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The hacking was on the Twitter Grader, rather the Website Grader itself. As a web developer of a couple web scripts myself, there are always going to be vulnerabilities. Twitter always runs a risk because of its popularity. When I was a top 10 Yahoo! Clubs founder and cofounder before they merged Yahoo! Clubs and eGroups to form Yahoo! Groups), I had been hacked. The largest group I had was over 50K in members and the least on the top ten was over 23K. I was stressful because I was in college at the time. My only luck was that Yahoo! then offered phone support – which they stopped doing after all the mayhem.
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I believe Lorelle does some podcasts and convention speaking. She is now a very busy woman and one I hope to meet at a future WordCamp. I would probably suggest sending her an email and asking her if she was going to continue blogging on her site. However, as I said, it may be because of her busy schedule. I still have no idea how Matt Mullenweg, God Bless his heart, has the time as he is also very busy. I cannot wait to Interview him in person this June at WordCamp Chicago.
Tagging is the area in my blogging habit where I paid least attention till now. I feel I need to learn bit more about these tags, how search engines treat them, and some good practices to tag.
Flores, are these tags counted by search engines or on what they play role? Is it to increase traffic or for ranking? Further information regarding this will be highly thanked.
Suresh Khanal
A lot of times they are highly associated with keywords, so they can be counted by search engines if you only use a plain tagging system rather than a SEO plugin.
That means I need to leave off the SEO pluggin and tag my posts by hand?
You should probably keep the SEO plugin active.
However, when you do, the keywords you put in will override those tags. Your tags on your blog will end up becoming just another type of search feature. Some people even put a tag list on their search pages to help people find what they need.
So… you kind of need both.
Does that make sense?
Oh! well. By the way, I read on one of the post that categories are better not to be displayed on post page as they will duplicate the contents and search engines do not prefer that. Do you have some idea about that?
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That would be false. The search engine is smart enough to document the category. If it matches another link that came up, then it is fine.
HOWEVER, you really should not use the category in your URL for your article permalinks. That is usually what is probably meant in that.
Thanks Flores for the response. You did a good help. Looking forward for your upcoming posts.
hi Nile, I probably use 6-7 tags per post and often, especially if I am running an article series, I will reuse the same tags. Is that a bad thing?
Please let me know about the categories? what about categories in the references of tags..?
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