Postcards from the Funny Farm

This is an extension of my post on categories. Blogging is a lot of fun. It’s gratifying when you share about your day or how you changed your water filter and then a lot of people comment on your work. Sometimes it’s enough to see through your analytics that a lot of people read your work. A thrill like no other though is when a post you wrote a while back gets a comment or you get a trackback showing someone you don’t know and who is not connected to your blogger circle read it and benefitted by it. This kind of thrill often happens as a result of smart categorization and tagging of posts.

Tags are words or short phrases used in identifying a post to search engines. When I first started, tags, keywords, and categories all seemed to blend together. Through time and a lot of reading, I have a pretty firm grasp of the distinctions. To understand tags, you need to analyze the structure of an internet page code. Without getting unnecessarily technical, the pattern of a blog webpage code (as the browsers and search engines see it) can be clearly seen laid out at this reference page.

All search engines more or less have their own “formula” for sifting page information. One thing we do know is the title is always important. When you hear people talking about choosing titles that are “SEO” optimal, they are talking about a real thing.

The standard was first “Meta Keywords.” Google and Yahoo! no longer rely on these. Now they scan a different set of qualifiers from the content of a page. For this reason, tags in the “meta” lines of the page are usually useless to their intended purpose.

You should find a plugin that lets you insert tags (NOT TECHNORATI TAGS) in the meta header and that allows you to change the “Title” HTML of the page. That way you can still be offbeat in your titles and make the HTML page title SEO friendly. For example: I have a post called “Snails need to die” but in the top bar of the browser you see the title in small font as pesticides and use in the home for less . . . (or whatever search I’m looking to tag/sell it as). If you look at this post’s layout, the title is different from the seo title I came up with in the browser title. It’s a very “seo” smart way to do it every post.

Another helpful tagging plugin and/or system is a Technorati tags system. Technorati tags don’t benefit the post on Google but they will correctly categorize the post in a search on Technorati and that can be an effective place to get traffic. I wouldn’t make the Technorati tags my only tags however. A tagger (such as Ultimate tag Warrior) in conjunction with a Technorati tagger and a title rewrite plugin as mentioned above would be the perfect setup for getting your posts the most exposure and hopefully the most readers possible. Before I get too caught up in tags I must reiterate the dictum of all blogging: “Content is King.”