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. 

Today is a day of celebration here at BuzzMyBlog.com. It appears that Google has updated their Page Rankings and they have been very kind to BuzzMyBlog.com. My blog has jumped from a PageRank of 0 to a PageRank of 4! This is a huge jump and I expect a lot of good things to come from it.

What Is Page Rank 

For those who are not familiar, let me take a second and describe exactly what Page Rank really is. The Google PageRank™ is actually a trademarked term describing the search algorithm that was developed by Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were enrolled at Stanford University. It is the heart of the Google algorithm that decides the order in which web sites are listed for a given search term.

PageRank™ works by looking at the web in a democratic nature. When one web page links to another, Google considers it a "vote" of relevance for the page that is being linked to. The more sites that link to a specific page, the more "votes" it has thus the more relevant it is deemed by Google. Not all votes are created equally, however. Votes are "weighted" so that votes from more relevant websites are more important than votes from less relevant websites. Every few months, Google rolls up their sleeves and digs through their enormous databases to assign a number between 0 and 10 to all web pages they have indexed. Pages with a value of 0 are considered to be less important, while pages with a value of 10 are considered the most important. This number becomes the page's PageRank™. When someone queries Google with a search term, the results are returned in order of importance as determined by a top secret algorithm closely guarded by Google. No one knows the exact algorithm, but SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts make a career of trying to figure it out. The one thing that is known is that PageRank is a VERY important component of the algorithm.

Its not a very easy thing to explain. I hope I have done it justice. If you want more information, you can check out Google's explanation. Wikipedia has a good explanation of it as well.

What Does PageRank Do For Me

Ok, so here it is, April 30th, and your blog has been given a new PageRank from Google. What exactly does this mean for you? The answer is....lots and lots of good things!

• Higher Ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) - When someone searches Google using keywords related to your website, your site will be returned higher in the list when you have a higher PageRank. For example, last week BuzzMyBlog.com was ranked unbearably low for the search terms "buzz blog". Since my PageRank has changed from 0 to 4, however, my ranking has gone from 100 something to 12! (seriously...I am giddy over this!). The value of this is obvious. The higher the search order, the more people find your blog, the more traffic you get, the more readers follow you, etc. etc.
• Your Links Become More Valuable - Not only does a higher page rank help my blog out, but it also helps out every blog that I link to. Now that my blog has a higher page rank, links from my blog carry more weight and help to increase the PageRank of any page that I link to. All of the sudden, my Weekly Buzz feature where I review up and coming blogs just got a lot more valuable. When I review a blog and link to it, Google sees that as a much more important vote of importance than it used to.
• You Are More Attractive to Advertisers - Higher search order and more weight for your links can only lead to one thing...more money. Advertisers realize the importance of a higher PageRank and they are often willing to pay more money to advertise on websites that have them. They know that a higher rank will lead to more traffic and higher probability of a web surfer seeing their ad. If you use a service like PayPerPost, that pays you money to blog about certain topics, then you will find more lucrative opportunities with a higher PageRank.

I am sure there are many more advantages to having a higher PageRank. If you know of any more, leave them in a comment.

How Do I Improve My Page Rank

Having a higher PageRank sounds good, doesn't it? So how do you go about getting one? This is a topic that can run you in circles trying to figure out. There are SEO experts out there that claim that they can improve your PageRank over night. If someone is trying to sell this to you, don't believe them. They are just trying to get your money. Yes there are things that can be done to make your site more "Google friendly", but PageRanks are only assigned by Google every few months. Nothing will change overnight.

SEO experts claim to have a few tricks up their sleeves that will help give you a higher PageRank. I would be careful going down this road as well. If Google catches on that you are trying to cheat the system, they have been known to slap sites with pretty hard penalties. Google can reward sites by increasing PageRank, but they can also reprimand sites by lowering it. It is not uncommon at all for blogs to have their PageRank lowered for excessive linking, hidden text, paid links, or anything else that threatens the authenticity of the algorithm.

I am not an SEO Expert by far. But I can say that there is, without a doubt, one sure fire way to raise your PageRank - and that is TIME. Be patient and just focus on your blog. All the time you spend worrying about your PageRank and Search Engine Optimization, you could be spending improving your blog and writing quality content. In the long run, this is really the best way to get a high ranking from Google. Think about it...that is what the algorithm was designed to do - to give a ranking to relevant websites. What better way to get a high ranking than to make it MORE RELEVANT! Don't try to cheat the system. You'll just end up being penalized by Google. Instead, focus on writing strong content and give people a reason to link to your blog. You will be rewarded because you deserve to be, and you will find yourself getting more traffic and interested readers. In the long run, this is what we all want, isn't it?

Giving people a reason to link to my blog is what has helped raise my PageRank. I did not pay for links, and I did not try any tricks or cheats to appear more relevant. Instead, I focused on a writing content that helps other bloggers. My Weekly Buzz feature rewards my readers with a free review and prizes that help promote their blog. By doing this, I have given people a reason to link to my blog because they really want to. The Google algorithms operate on my blog as the were designed to be used. This is the best way to raise your PageRank.

I hope you have found this study to the Google PageRank informative. If you have anything to add, please leave it in a comment. If you have not yet signed up for my Weekly Buzz, you might want to do it now. With my new PageRank, the weekly reviews just became a lot more valuable!

Jeff