Best Tagging Practices - SEO Audit Every Post
Tagging Posts
To be honest I think I've been over-tagging. Tagging is still fairly new to me, I really just started using tagging on the web (outside Flickr) especially my blog in the past few months.
In 58 posts I've developed 254 tags.
Calculate that out to be...
- 4.3 unique tags per post
What I'd like to shoot for is re-using tags and using good tagging practices. I read an article this morning about Tagging best Practices but all that really talks about is being succinct, lowercase and singular with my tagging.
Auditing my tags will allow me to have better looking tag clouds. You know the kind that might actually be useful for my visitors, cause this is an ugly beast.
And once I trim that down I can employ some of the 10 Best Practices for Displaying Tag Clouds which will help my tag cloud become more useful for visitors.
Updated Guidelines for Tagging
I am going to employ the following rules for tagging during this audit.
- Do not use the same tag as a category
- It's okay occasionally deny a post of tags entirely
- Use tags that would be re-usable but not important enough to be categories
- Don't over-tag for the sake of tagging or keyword stuffing
Where to Start
I started by going through my tag cloud and finding really obscure tags that didn't make any sense or seemed entirely too vague. After editing down probably 1/2 of my posts's tags and removing a number of 1 post tags I got down to 157 tags. Yes I removed almost 100 tags that I deemed less than useful. Now there's only a ratio of 2.7 unique tags per post. Not great but we'll definitely re-evaluate once I get another 30 more posts up.
Try looking at the big picture. If someone wants to find a post on tagging are they really going to click on a "folksonomy" tag name of a tag named "tagging." It's more about getting inside the head of a visitor trying to find posts on different topics than providing too many tags that might only help people searching from Technorati or other tag indexing services.
What About all Those Links?
When I updated my category structure I was careful to update my redirects to ensure old categories were going to the right places but with tags I feel less strongly about making that update. I'll keep an eye on my 404 log, using Alex King's 404 Notifier Wordpress Plugin and redirect any tags that I see a lot of queries to, but adding 100 redirects seems absurd. Instead I employed a new solution, an auto search for [now] non-existent tags!
Look at my cleaned up tag cloud now. Much better!
Easier Maintenance of Tags in The Future
I'm so glad that Wordpress now has built in support for tagging but the lack of a tool to maintain the tags with is absurd. but Advanced Tag Entry by Jennifer Hodgdon, Poplar ProductivityWare is a great tool until the Wordpress team realizes they dropped the ball on this. Trust me, if you are using tags you need this plugin
Popularity: 29% [?]
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Another thing to keep in mind about my best practices article, along with most of the articles on Tagamac, is that I'm usually approaching tagging from a desktop perspective (a private tagging system) as opposed to tagging for a blog.
I've yet to sit down and pound out a good approach to public tagging systems. What I've been doing on my own blog is asking myself, "If a visitor likes this article, what other articles will they enjoy?" and tagging based on that. I also try to keep the number of different tags I use to as few as possible, just for my own sanity (I definitely don't want to need to do a clean-up like the one you described).
Interestingly, I've been finding that I use my tags far more than my visitors do. I'll use tags to find old articles quickly, but otherwise the tags really only get used by search engines (and I'm pretty sure I've never seen a hit for my tag cloud).
Given that I never use them, either, I'm beginning to think that tag clouds online are possibly completely worthless as a navigational tool. Tags are more useful for developing loosely associated relations between articles than for helping people browse effectively.
Thanks for the link!