Best Practice for Using Tags within WordPress -
WordPress post tags are an often overlooked and misinterpreted feature. The bloggers all use different ways to use them and it's rare to see them used frequently on a website.
It doesn't have to be this way. Tags are actually quite easy if you take a moment to comprehend their primary purpose and then put a plan to implement their usage. Additionally, when used correctly, tags can be very effective in improving the experience of users. However, when used incorrectly they are nothing but an overloaded and unorganized instrument for navigation that could have an adverse affect on user satisfaction.
It's not unusual for bloggers to avoid tag usage completely since it seems as they bring no benefit for a website. It's only true that they're used with any forethought. Tags won't change the world, but if properly used, they will give a new aspect to your website.
Tagging is something you should implement as soon as possible. Instead of rushing your website and apply tags to your content it is better to take a review of them, and then figure out the best way to make use of them.
What Exactly are Tags?
Start any great non-fiction text. In the first chapter of the book, you'll be presented with an index that includes the chapter titles. This gives you an understanding of what information is being covered in the book and also how the content is organized. These can be linked with your blog's categories.
Then, you'll need to go to the bottom at the end of your book. The index is located there, which displays important terms or phrases in the book. Every item on the index lists the page number on which that word or phrase is utilized, making it easy to find them easily.
Consider tags as your website's index.
Tags allow picking out specific details about your content and providing an easy method of separating your posts by this one element of data.
If you run your own sports blog. The sport you talk about on your site are your subjects: Football Baseball, Basketball, etc. They are topics that you will be talking about on the website, which is why they will have higher types of organization. For instance, let's say that your last blog post is about the Atlanta Falcons and your reader would like to read more regarding the team. They could go to your Football category and look for posts on the team or you could help them to find them by putting up the Atlanta Falcons tag that is linked to every post you've written on them.
If you were person who reads, which method would you choose? Tagging like this creates an effective method for navigating across your blog. It's also the best way to improve user engagement.
What is the best way to tag effectively?
Tags must be brief and contain two or three words at most. They are designed to indicate important data that are contained in text. Therefore, they should be relevant to the text of the post.
The manner in which you design your tags is extremely important. In our example of a sports website again, "Atlanta Falcons" and "atlanta falcons" are two separate tags. If you use the case of title tag for some of your posts, and lower case tags for others, you're not connecting all your posts together. This is creating two different pools of content on the Atlanta Falcons and adversely affecting your site navigation. Pick a style to your tags, and make sure that it's consistently used (I recommend using the title cases).
Tags can be used too often and underused. If you use a tag two or three times throughout the lifetime of your site then there's no reason for to use it. It's not relevant enough to your website and doesn't need to be. So delete it. However, using tags that are the same on nearly every post could be a blunder. The tags you use are not specific enough and won't provide any real benefit to your site's navigation.
It is easy to determine the importance of a tag by asking: When a reader gets to the bottom of the article, could the tag potentially be interesting enough for them to click on? Using the example from sports again, if I'd just read an article about the Atlanta Falcons and that tag was presented to me in the middle of the article it's likely that there's a high possibility that I'd be interested in studying more. The tag would be relevant and useful tag according to me.
Managing Your Tags
Do not be fooled: keeping a well-organized and precise tag structure is quite a task.
It's easy to incorrectly tag a post or not include tags in a posting or have the format of the tag wrong on occasion. The chances of this happening are significantly higher if you have more than one author on your blog. If you are going to make use of tags on your blog then you are going to be required to devote some time maintaining tags.
There are a variety of tasks to be completed in order to maintain a healthy tagging structure:
- Go through all of your tags to be sure that they're formatted properly
- Remove duplicate tags
- Go through each post since your last maintenance check and ensure they are all properly tagged
If you go through these chores on a regular basis, they shouldn't take you much time to complete. It is recommended to spend a few minutes each month on maintaining. So it's always be up to date and the chance of having posts with issues is greatly decreased.
If you do not perform regular maintenance on your tags you risk having a bloated and ineffective tag structure for your blog which will be ineffective for everyone.
Displaying Your Tags
There are numerous ways to highlight your tags and increase the effectiveness of your tags.
Most blogs have tag links in the post meta section of each article written. This is a simple method to allow readers to read about the topic that they've finished. However, it may be a good idea to employ other methods to help showcase the tags you use.
WordPress also comes with a widget that will allow you to add an Tag Cloud to your sidebar. Tag clouds are weighted lists which increase the size of your more frequently used tags while decreasing the size of those less frequently used tags. Tag clouds can serve as a helpful method of highlighting important topics associated with your blog posts, but if you have a large number of tags they may look a little chaotic.
My favorite way of showing the tags is using tags in a cloud, however not as a sidebar (such as my archive page on Leaving Work Behind, shown above). I suggest to make an archive page for your website that includes multiple forms of navigation, of which one is a tag cloud. This will allow you to remove your sidebar to be used for other items that are important while bringing all of the navigation techniques you use to create a page.
Utilizing a combination of post meta as well as any other method of displaying your tags will go a long way to guaranteeing that your visitors get access to your tags to move around your site.
Conclusion
Using tags on your site is not a requirement you need to implement, however should you decide to making use of them, it's worthwhile to plan out your strategy of tagging ahead and to enforce it on a regular basis.
Tags can add a useful and extremely targeted way to navigate your site. If done correctly they will assist you to establish authority over subjects you cover. When they're not used correctly, they'll significantly hinder your engagement as well as ease of navigation around your site.
Are you using tags on your site? If you have suggestions on how to use them to their full potential we'd like to hear from you via the comments.
Photo Credit: bobydimitrov