It is very easy to confuse the difference between tags and categories when labeling your posts. Some people prefer one over the other, not really understanding the difference between the two. The article offers a few helpful suggestions on how you can utilize both tags and categories simultaneously in order to assist the friendly neighborhood search engine robots.
What are tags?
If you're familiar with social media / bookmarking sites like Technorati, Digg, or StumbleUpon then chances are you are familiar with tags. Tags give you a way to label your posts with a number of descriptive keywords. Think of tags as descriptive labels, where categories are just general topics. A single post should generally (but doesn't have to) fall into one category, but have a number of tags. For example, say you publish a post about Halo 3 for your XBox 360. You might choose "Video Games" as the category, but have "halo, xbox, FPS tips, cheats" as your tags.
What is the benefit of tags?
You should make an effort to keep your categories clean and organized. Don't use multiple category names for the same topic (ie - television and tv). Your categories should be your primary form of navigation among topics, so it is important that they make sense. Tags, on the other hand, can be all over the place. Think of them as another way people can search for your article and find other relevant information throughout your site. When naming your tags, try think about what a person will use as keyword if they were searching for it in a search engine. After reading an interesting article on your site, instead of browsing through an entire category or searching your site for more relevant topics, your reader can just click on the tag links. Boom! They've got their search terms already lined up for them. For this reason, it good to include your tag links at the end of your post.
Tip #1: If you used WordPress, any theme developed prior to version 2.3 may not include tags names in the layout of each post, even though you entered them when writing the post. This can easily be fixed by using the Theme Editor and adding the following code to the single.php file wherever you want the tags to appear.
<?php the_tags( 'Tags: ', ', ', ''); ?>
On some sites you will see a tag cloud that shows the popular tags used on all prior posts. The more popular tags have larger text while rarely used tags will have very small text. This is becoming a popular way to navigate tags as well. Whether you use a tag cloud or categories for navigation is a matter of personal preference. However, there really isn't a need to show both. Personally, I prefer my categories to be used for navigation and the tags to be used as a form of searching.
Is SEO Really Dead?
There has been a lot of talk lately about SEO becoming unnecessary. It is true that search engines are becoming more sophisticated and no longer rely on meta keywords entirely for determining content topics. That doesn't mean that you should give up optimization techniques entirely though. Do you still eat chicken soup when you're sick? I do. In case it still helps, I have chosen to add my post tags as meta-tags in the post's html header. WordPress does not do this by default, but you can use this plugin if you want it to. This technique will help you tell the search engine what YOU think its keywords should be. Just make sure the keywords really match your content. Search engines are smart enough to penalize you for keywords that don't match.
Tip #2: Update your tag on old posts. Once you have looked through your traffic stats and see what search words people have used to find particular posts, go back and update the tags to include keywords you may have forgotten. It could help to improve the relevancy score for your post.
Other than adding your tags as keyword meta-tags in your html code, there is no official standard for finding tags in a post. I wish there was. Think about how much easier it would be to use a social bookmark service if the author provides the tags for you. How many times have you read an blog post and wanted to Stumble it but couldn't decide what tags to use? Hopefully one day, these services will be able to parse out the tags in the actual post and automate much more of the bookmarking process. In the meantime, including tags in your post will at least give your readers an idea of what tags you'd want them to use.
Using tags may not have an immediate impact on your blog. However, if it is something that could make life easier for your readers, why wouldn't you do it? Eventually, you may find more sophisticated uses of tags that will make you wish you were using them all along.
