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01.27.10
 By
Michael GrayIn my opinion one of the more powerful and underutilized tools of a blog or website is the ability to tag your pages and posts. That said, effectively using tags isn't easy or straightforward. In this post I'll take you through some examples of how to use tags and get the most out of them, the pitfalls to watch out for, and some advanced strategies you can use with them. First we need to take a step back and understand that there are several ways you can arrange your website/blog. The first is by subject, which most blog and CMS platforms call "categories." The second is by date, which occurs as most blog/cms systems put things in year, month, and date groupings. A third is by tagging, which consists of the notes or descriptions you put on your posts or pages. All of these different classification methods bring about one of the hallmark problems of blogs and CMS's: duplicate content. Let's assume that you publish one page. That page will exist on the page, but also on the category archive page, year archive page, year-month archive page, year-month-day archive page, and the archive page for any tag that you attach to the page/post. This can create issues as the search engines have to figure out what page they should really list in the SERP's. First I suggest blocking all of the date archives from being indexed by using the "noindex" directive in the robots.txt (note Google is the only search engine who currently supports this command). I also use the "noindex/follow" robots tag on each of the date archive pages. Basically we are telling the robots don't put these pages in the SERP's but follow through and get the pages. We go with the exact same settings for the tag pages. If you are running wordpress you can use the Robots Meta plugin from Joost de Valk to get this done. This only leaves us with the duplicate issue on category and individual pages. To combat this problem, only show limited sections of your posts on the category pages. The thesis theme has this functionality built in. If you aren't using thesis, you can use the teaser plugin to get a similar result or remember to use the "more" tag 100% of the time.
OK now that we've got the duplicate content issue resolved, why would anyone want to use tags in the first place? Can't you achieve the same results with categories? Yes and no. Here's an example of how I would use categories and tags: let's say you have a celebrity website with categories like "baby bump," "fashion," "news," "rumors," etc. You are also going to have celebrities who are always in the news like Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. What I would do is create tags for each celebrity and, whenever I did a post about the celebrity, I'd tag it with his or her name. Another example. You have a travel website with categories like "adventure travel," "family travel," "skiing," "cruises," and so on. I would set up tags for countries, states, or cities, like Bahamas, France, or Colorado. You could have a white water rafting page in the adventure travel category tagged with Colorado. You could have a Skiing in Vail post in the skiing category also tagged with Colorado. You can also have a family travel article about visiting the Museum of Science and nature and Botanic Gardens in Colorado. Those three separate articles would be interconnected by using the Colorado tag. Here's where the magic of tagging comes into play. If you use the cross linker plugin, you can set it up to automagically link any word like "Colorado" to the tag page for Colorado. So if the person reading any of the three Colorado articles clicks on "Colorado," they visit the tag page and see all of your posts about Colorado. I've found that in-posts links get much higher click throughs than "tag" links at the end of an article. You could set it up the same way for Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, or any other word/tag you used. What this does is create an alternate navigation path that's both really useful for readers and keeps your content exposed to the search engine spiders. You could link the word individually as you write each post, but I find it easier to manage a website when I cut down the maintenance wherever I can. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Michael Gray is SEO specialist and publishes a Search Engine Industry blog at www.Wolf-Howl.com. He has over 10 years experience in website development and internet marketing, helping both small and large companies increase their search engine visibility, traffic, and sales. Michael is a current member of Internet Marketing of New York ( IM-NY.org) and a guest speaker on Webmaster Radio. He is also an editor for the popular search engine new website Threadwatch.org. |
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