Quick Tech Primer
One of the best parts of what I get to do at ProBlogService.com is meet new customers. However, one of my least favorite things to do is to correct misconceptions about blogging technology.
No doubt, if you are reading this post, you have investigated business blogging service providers and have probably stumbled across some of these misconceptions. One of the most common is related to tags. In fact, tags are so misunderstood that they make for a great tool to evaluate potential partners in blogging. If a vendor or service provider doesn’t understand tags, chances are they really don’t know blogging very well, either.
Tag Myths, Tag Facts
Myth: Tags are used for making blogs easy to navigate.
Fact: Tags are single words (you can do more than one word, but most people don’t because using quotes is a nuisance for Del.icio.us users) for providing hints for social bookmark sites. Tags are used to help users of sites like Del.icio.us or Technorati.com quickly categorize your website. Organizing your site by tag probably is a good way to make the site make little sense.
Myth: Tags and Keywords are the same thing.
Fact: Keywords are used to make your site easier to search. Tags are used as organization hints for social bookmark users. Sometimes your tags and keywords are the same thing. Most of the time, though, keywords tend to make more sense to humans and tags tend to be a collection of words. For example: your keyword is “SARBOX compliance software” your tags should be “software sarbox accounting sarbanes-oxley”. Oh, and long tail tags don’t really work that well.
Myth: You should select tags the same way you select keywords for your website.
Fact: Tags are used to categorize bookmarks on sites like Del.icio.us. People do not use tags the same way as keywords – they use them to indicate broad topics or emotions instead of specifics. Your tags should make it easy for someone to quickly categorize your article in their links, not as some kind of tool for telling Google what your site is about. Take a look at Del.icio.us and look what tags people are assigning to links there – you’ll be amazed how broad the tags are.
Myth: Tags should be part of my search engine optimization strategy.
Fact: Using tags to game Google for higher search position is probably not going to work out for you. Most short single word keywords are incredibly difficult to optimize for and Google has been on to tag stuffing and other third rate SEO trickery for several years. On top of that, users of social bookmarking sites will simply create their own tags if they don’t like yours.
Myth: Tags are a waste of time.
Fact: There are millions of users of sites like Digg.com, Del.icio.us and Technoriati.com. Users of these sites share bookmarks (read, their bookmark of your website) with their friends. And they can have 534,391 friends they share with. On top of that, Google and other search engines seem to smile on sites that come up often in social bookmark sites.
Hi Mike,
great post. Google most recent release indicates that search terms from aggregate tags is a very important factor, as blogs with correctly structured permalinks are far more competitive for key search terms than those that do not.
In other words, using tags in permalinks on platforms like Wrodpress has a huge effect on effective positioning with the Google renovate algorithm. On my blog, I use tags in all the posts, and the url of the post is built by those tags. The tags are constructed from the Technorati equivalent.
Of course, by architecture standards, Delicio.us does not tag correctly, at least not yet, thought their change of June 2008 did address this somewhat.
Correctly structure tags are concatenated using dashes when discussing their application in seo, allowing multiple words in the tag in a logical order.
Long tail keywords provide the most superior result, so long as every variation of the tag is considered and used.
SARBOX compliance software would be tagged correctly as:
sarbox-compliance-software
The software in compliant social media platforms like Youtube, WordPress.com, (again, Delicio.us is not quite there yet) removes the concatenator (the dashes) yet keeps the words in order when parsing into the tag database.
Quite right that people don`t use the same as keywords, but the software that parses the tags into an intelligible format does handle them like keywords.
regards,
Ron
Mike,
Thanks for the insight and suggestions.
Dan Ryan
Sr. Consultant
The Human Capital Group