Recently, clients asked about the importance of including tags in their blog posts. What are they? How do they work? What do they do?
Tags are basically keywords. They are words and phrases used to categorize blog posts. If your blog post is about attorney blogging, you want to include the following tags: blogging, attorney, attorney blogging, lawyers. This categorizes your topics, but without the structure of specific categories, and determines where your blog post should be “filed” on the Internet. Technorati, a blog searching site, features a page with the top 100 external tags.
There are internal and external tags. Internal tags help bloggers organize their posts within their site and help with internal linking, good for search engines. External tags are the ones Technorati, Del.icio.us and other social sharing sites track and bloggers use for visibility.
Tags help blog search queries and readers determine content and relevance as to what they are looking to read about. An example of how it influences searches is if you write a post about twitter and add twitter as a tag, http://twitter.alltop.com will add your post to its page. Without the tag, the post would not be recognized and posted on this third-party site, which drives traffic to the post.
Tags are also used for bookmarking. When blog surfers search for a blog on a specific topic, they can click the associated tags on the blog and find sites that are tagged with the same word. Users can also find the bookmarked Web site if they enter the tag which you categorized the post.
Using tags properly and determining the right tags plays an important role in directing users to your site. Bookmarking and tagging allow users to easily search, save and share sites of interest and generate traffic.