Tag…You’re It

So you’ve probably seen, heard of, or used categories for your WordPress blog posts.  Maybe you have a news category, a photography category, a recipe category, and the obligatory Uncategorized category.  As a Denver online marketing company, we make use of four basic categories for our blog posts.  So categories are all about keeping it simple.  There’s a good chance you’ll confuse yourself and your readers if your blog post is in a category for politics, shopping, and local music.

But sometimes, you might write a post that covers your political opinion, latest thrift store finds, and most recently attended concert.  So…how do you deal with that?

Use tags!

Tags are essentially keywords that describe your posts’ subject matter.  You can literally tag your posts with any words and as many tags as you want (although we suggest keeping it to a maximum of five or so tags)— names of politicians, names of stores, names of bands…whatever.  However, it’s usually prudent to keep your tags simple, so that internet surfers can find your tagged post easily.  For example, “Denver band” is going to be more effective than “new local Denver band playing at the Bluebird,” because people are likely to use few words in a search for blog subject matter.

So, tags are helpful in searches outside of your blog, but they are just as important on your blog itself!  Tags can help you organize your posts— for example, tags give you the ability to devote whole sections of your blog to posts containing a certain subject matter.  This is done by the recall of blog posts with a specific tag included in them.  You might have some “pages” on your blog— away from the prominent home page— labeled as “local music,” “politics,” and “fashion.”  When a reader clicks on these pages, they can view an archive of your blog posts that contain these respective tags.  This is extremely useful for readers who are interested in specific subject matter— the ones who have little interest in politics, but are very into the local music scene.

In conclusion, tags are easy to clip on to your blog posts, and extremely helpful in the realms of internet searches and your own site organization.  So, get out there and start tagging!

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Icon courtesy of Deepu Balan, released under a CC BY 2.5 license.