How Important is the Tag List in a Blog?

By Khate on 8:46 AM

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The need for tags or labels is something that has its origins in our daily activities and in our way of living. We have to keep it organized if we want to find our stuff. And sometimes, when things evolve to a higher complexity, we are forced to create categories and labels so we can find what we want quickly. Blogs are just holders of our ideas and thoughts in the form of articles: having the ability to label them is crucial, especially in cases where there are many categories of discussion and the years pass and more and more articles are published. You have to be able to organize it further more then categories.

What are tags

Tags are labels. An article can be placed in one or more categories and can also receive tags so the users can have multiple choices of sorting the articles. These tags are very helpful because the categories are more general - tags can compensate this by further describing the subjects that can be a part of a certain category. You can assign how many tags you want to an article but try and stick to less then 5.

This number of 5 tags is my choice. You can do whatever you want and in some cases I also bend this rule. The reason for having maximum 5 tags is because I believe that tags should be descriptive and this means a tag has minimum 2 words. Google has a recommendation that says you should not have more then 100 links on a page.

This rule is often broken when we are talking about blogs. We should try and respect this rule because the consequence is simple: Google will not crawl some of your links and this will lead to less indexed pages then you should have. Usually a page on a blog contains the latest 10 articles or posts. Additionally you have categories, most used tags, the blogroll and few other links. All these links together with the tags that each article has can easily overcome the 100 link limit. So use it carefully. Just because you can assign how many tags you want to an article doesn't means that you can go over the top.

Why is important to a have a list of tags for your blog
Let me tell you what happens if you choose not to build a list of tags right at the beginning of your blogging days. Here are some issues that you'll have:

* most likely you'll add more and more tags to your blog and you'll end up with similar tags all over the place
* having similar tags will not only confuse the readers but could also lead to some overlooked articles (if you have few tags that basically mean the same thing then how do your readers would know?)
* you'll miss all the SEO benefits a list of tags can offer you

Developing a list of tags is very important. You should do it before you start blogging: just like keyword planning or developing a theme for your blog. Think to the categories your blog will have and how you can further describe those categories. Think that tags will help you somehow divide the categories in smaller portions and you will be able to sort your articles much better.

This is the thing a list of tags will do for you : will help you organize your articles much better and much more efficient. That is why you should create a tag list because otherwise you'll only create confusion for your readers and for yourself.

Use keywords in your tags

Besides the fact that tags can be used to sort out articles much better then using only categories you can use it to target specific keywords. That is why tags should have meaningful forms : do not use single words. Try and describe what you want to say and just like in the case of keywords try and create tags from 2 or 3 words that you wish to target.

You have to realize that Google will visit your page and will encounter those tags. If the text of a link is relevant to the target of the link then Google will consider that the link has value. So try and assign tags to articles that are really related. This relation is best if it can be established in terms of common keywords in the text link and the title of the article or at least some synonyms. The more content you'll have relevant to all of your tags the more you'll increase the chance of ranking well on Google for the keywords contained in those tags.

How many of you think of tags like this?

I don't know how many of us realize the importance of tags right at the beginning of blogging. Usually it happens somewhere on the road after we published few articles at which point we realize that we should try and maintain some consistency in how we name our tags. Sometimes it's to late and sometimes we just let it go and we try to improvise as we publish more and more articles.

The truth is that without some serious planning you won't be able to have a list of tags that will get you benefits and will also be a real help for you and your readers.

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