The Importance of Tagging in Blogs

In order to get a significant amount of traffic to your website, you must be able to rank high in the search engines. So if you have a blog, but you aren't an SEO expert, how do you get noticed by the search engines? The key here is tagging, which is mentioned in a recent article, Top 10 Sources For Massive Web Site Traffic on SiteProNews.

Tags are basically another name for keywords, the words people type into the search engines to find your website or article. They are also the categories on your blog. You might not have paid a lot of attention to your blog post categories before, but take a closer look. When you write a blog post, you will either create a new category or post it into an existing category. What is the name of that category? That is what you need to pay the most attention to, because not only do these categories keep your blog posts organized, but they are the reason people will find your site.

For example, if you create a random category it's probably not going to be as effective as a category called "internet marketing". I know I am guilty of the random category as well; sometimes it's just easier that way.

In this Web 2.0 era, as more and more people look to social bookmarking sites such as Technorati and Digg from which to get their information, the way you tag your article will effect how or if it is found by fellow searchers. Therefore, it is important to be very descriptive when creating these categories.

Here is what today's top tags on Technorati look like:

Likewise, you want to be as specific as possible when you tag. The more generalized words such as technology will of course have more competition and so your article will be harder to find. By being more specific, you will be able to find your niche audience, those people that are truly interested in reading your article, and your website traffic will increase.