SEO in Blogs 3: Use the Tags!

Everything in SEO seems to refer to tags – if it isn’t Title Tags, then it’s Metatags or there’s alt tags for images. Well, here is another type and one that will probably become much better known than any of the others, particularly in connection with Blogs.

In this instance, a “Tag” is like a subject or category, and it is one of the few elements in SEO which is unique to blogs because of the way that some of the Blog Search Engines use their own type of “Tags” to help categorise posts. They are not used instead of a normal ‘search’ function but alongside it and it is the author of the post who attaches the Tags to it. The rationale is that rather than just rely on the Search Engine to categorise it in the way they wish, the blogger can also indicate where and how they think it should be categorised as well.

Probably the best known of the Blog Search Engines which use these extensively is Technorati, though there are a number of others which offer the same format such as Del.icio.us. You also have sites such as Flickr offering the type of categorisation for photos.

Some people believe that this is the direction in which indexing information on the web is likely to go – that remains to be seen, but in the meantime it is certainly worth including relevant tags for Technorati at the least so that your visibility with the users of their Search Engine is improved. In wider SEO terms, they have the additional benefit that they contain your keywords or ones relate closely to the subject matter of the post which in itself adds to the keyword levels in the post and on the page.

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