Most blogging software allows you to put tags to your blog posts. Do you have a strategy when it comes to tags or is there a minimum or maximum amount of tags you are using? Do you use as many tags as possible or do you focus on a few?
I have read some SEO articles before about not going wild on tags and more recently I read a blog post from the former SEO manager for fashion magazine ELLE. He talked about the biggest mistake fashion bloggers are making and he advises them not to have an overwhelming amount of tags. He also said, that if you aren’t covering a subject very regular, you shouldn’t even use that subject as a tag.
Here’s that blog post (in case you are interested)
Re: For all bloggers out there: Lets talk about #tags
It is a good point, and I suppose it also makes you wonder, what do you use the tags for? Are they for SE purposes only, or do you use them to help surfers search for things within your blog?
Re: For all bloggers out there: Lets talk about #tags
I always thought tags was used to make it easier to find similar posts, and help users. Adding lots of different tags defeats the purposes I think? I try and be quite strict on gaydemon with tags and mainly tag posts with performers names or try and re-use the same tags rather than making up new ones. I mean what’s the point with a tag if only one post use it.
Re: For all bloggers out there: Lets talk about #tags
I tend to go for, on average, 5 tags per post, and more often use tags that are already there. Most of them will be there after just a few months of posting if you have a general theme to your content.
I agree with Michael on that example too, there is no reason to repeat “Syria” in all those tags, just adding “Syria” once and “Civil War” once would do away with the need to add all of those other variations.
Bloggers seem to have a warped opinion of what Google can do, we don’t need to spell everything out for them. I am moving away from the use of a keyword in text, because there is less and less evidence of it being beneficial. Google can read the content, and it has comparative data to be able to understand that “naked jock” and “nude jock” mean the same thing. It would probably be more effective to use both variations of that in text than to use one repeatedly.
I think a lot of bloggers need to reverse the process - use more variations of the same thing in the text, and restrict tags to fewer words specifically to assist readers in finding similar content.
Re: For all bloggers out there: Lets talk about #tags
I think with anything in this business (or any online marketing really) that webmasters tend to overdo things. Way back when, the keyword tag was the way to get traffic and sites would put 100s of words in their keyword tag. Someone at sometime said tags were a great way to get traffic so webmasters started putting 20 tags at the bottom of their post. And of course what always happens with search engines is that there’s a correction. So if you have: long cocks, big cocks, huge cocks, humongous cocks, etc., and repeat them all with “dicks,” then it really begins to mean nothing to anyone, including search engines.
I went through my tags a few months back and really cleaned them up.
Any tag with 1 post got dumped. Niether google or your surfers are going to be thrilled to find one post under a tag. If you have 1 post in each of 8 different tags that are variations on “big dick,” you’d get better coverage by merging all 8 tags into one.
Lots of tags (mostly due to errors when posting) had 0 posts, they were deleted. You should check for those, you probably have lots of them that happened accidentally and you didn’t even notice.
I had lots of dupes like grey-haired men and men with grey hair, so I merged all those. hairy men, hairy dudes, hairy guys, furry men, hairy jocks., etc there’s no point in Huffingtonizing yours tags like that.
I use tags for porn stars I know I’m going to write about regularly. But often leave others out, for instance, I can’t stand Topher DiMaggio, so he only ever gets covered if he’s in a scene with someone I really like. And I don’t even do a tag for him. If a guy is new, I often don’t do a tag until I’ve blogged about him a couple of times.
I think the purpose of tags is to help your readers find more of the same and if you approach it as such, you should be good. I don’t limit myself to a certain number of tags per post; if there are 6 men in a gang bang, two of them have uncut cocks, and 3 of them are eating cum, then the 6 porn stars get tagged as does uncut cocks and cum eating. But, by and large, I try and keep the number of tags to a minimum and not overdo them.
Also, if you already have a “hairy men” category, you don’t need a “hairy man” tag, it’s redundant.