WordPress Tag-alicious
Special guest post from Alex Syseof
Tags in WordPress play a huge role in great many aspects and directly influence your blog performance in such important areas as: Search Engine Optimization, Social Networks relevance and Reader Engagement.
And yet, many fail to realize full potential of WordPress tags and their proper implementation. In this article I would like to address that to some extent…
Tags for Search Engine Optimization
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about tags is – What Are They? Tags are keywords that describe your content, simple as that and yet in that description hides the importance of their proper usage. As keywords they become PART of your url and provide huge boost to Search Engine Relevance.
Using a tag cloud on the sidebar with Do Follow attributes sends search engines to links that include content that includes that tag (keyword) and gives them much needed content. Not only do you get better usage of the archived posts but also boost you rankings.
Interlinking of your posts for SEO using tags is extremely simple. As we all know internal links to relevant content counts by Search Engines not as highly as external links but still counts. Why not take advantage of it? After all – it is FREE SEO Boost!
I personally use “Simple Tags” plugin that uses tags to calculate relevance of the posts to each other and gives you options to display relevant posts under each article. Dynamically calculated SEO relevance that is completely HANDS OFF and on autopilot – Are You Using It?
Social Network Relevance
In this case I’m talking about the Technorati. I know… I know… you might say Technorati looses its power and influence but my personal results indicate that if you do it right – you get some traffic! Key here is getting it right!
First and most important step to this process is obviously to register and claim your blog on Technorati, which I will not cover. But second and yet JUST AS Important is to locate tags within Technorati networks that are most appropriate for YOUR blog. Create a list of those tags and make sure to use at least one of them in EACH post on your blog.
But in order for the Technorati to associate your blog post with one of the tags used – you have to tag that content in a specific format that they recognize. Quite time consuming if you ask me and since I love automating these types of tasks – I installed “Technorati Tags” plugin for WordPress. Just add one line of code to your theme and Voila! Your post is tagged for Technorati re-using your blogs internal tags!
Simple? I would say so and if used consistently it will bring you traffic from Technorati, I guarantee it as long as you picked the right tags and used them!
Reader Engagement
Dynamic and dated format of the blog content is its greatest benefit and at the same time its biggest failure! The older your content becomes – less relevant it becomes in the eyes of the Search Engines but what perhaps is even worse – is in the eyes of The Reader!
You are writing for the people. And while we would like to think that people come and see our blog from it’s front page – my stats shows that over 65% of new visitors land on one of the internal pages! Posts that you might have written in a hurry all of a sudden became the face of your blog and reader finds it irrelevant to his needs – he is looking for a way to click away and never come back!
You have only few options to engage them and hope to retain them by providing MORE relevant and recent content!
Option One: using the “Simple Tags” you present them with a list of tags relevant to the current post articles on your blog. In many cases this will draw them deeper into content.
Option Two: Using Most Recent (latest) articles on your blog’s sidebar. This might help you to present your latest content and engage the reader – provide a clickable link they are looking for and yet, retain them!
Option Three: Tag Cloud. Yep, this one is good not only for Search Engine Optimization but also for reader Engagement. People are getting used to the tags on blogs and realize that Tags are keywords! Clicking on keyword relevant to their search will provide them with access to more content they need! Mission Accomplished.
I hope this quick post helps you see some of the usage of the tools built into your blog and available elsewhere. 2 simple plugins you can install can help you greatly enhance your blog!
Alex Sysoef, is a blogger who shares his knowledge and experience on the pages of his WordPress Web 2.0 Guide blog, wrote this guest post. Visit for even more tips and strategies.
A thank you to Alex for supplying some great tips especially the two plugins that are now part of this blog for testing.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed both here and at Aiex’s blog.
