How many tags should I have on my blog post?
I attended your blogging class last week and had a question. I was wondering if it was good to put a lot of tags, or only a few? Any advice with this would be great! Thanks so much for your help! — S.
Lots of tags are fine: Use as many or as few are appropriate.
Tags are specific, so let’s use a recent news post of mine as an example: “Rihanna adds Birmingham tour date to aid tornado relief.”
For this post, I used three categories, City, Event and Video. But for the tags …
concert, downtown, fund-raiser, Loud Tour, R&B, Rihanna, storm, tornado, Umbrella
And that’s just nine tags. I usually have more in longer posts.
Both categories and tags help you and the reader find related content, and they help search engines find your post.
Taking just 60 seconds to properly categorize and tag your posts will help tremendously with SEO and help your blog rise above a crowded field.
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One other suggestion: Keep a list of tags you’ve used before. Tags are like key numbers—they’re specific. For example, if you tag one post as “veggies” and another as “vegetables” they won’t really be related. WordPress and Movable Type (in MT it’s under Manage/Tags) make it easy to manage tags universally — something you need to regularly. Having orphan tags (tags that only show up in one post) probably isn’t a best practice anyone should use.
Good suggestion. My problem is I don’t know in advance what will actually be an orphan tag, since I have to take a leap of faith that it will be a tag used again in the future.
Good advice. I’m too stingy with using tags and need to be more generous. It’s not like they cost anything!
But do be careful to make sure each tag describes something of value within your post. Thanks for your comment, Lisa!
Im changing my other blog and putting less tags in the posts because its putting the click threw rate up and im getting some traffic that is doing nothing because of this the other thing that i am noticing google seems more intrested in title rather than tags.