Why Tags and Labels are Important to Blogging & How to Use Them Correctly

by Edie Melson @EdieMelson

I get the opportunity to evaluate a lot of blogs, from writers I meet with at conferences to clients. And they all have many of the same questions. One of the most common is what are some tips to help their blogs get found.

There’s one easy answer—proper tagging/labeling with each post.

When I give this answer, I get a lot of blank looks. This is one critical step a lot of blogger miss when posting a blog. Today, I’m going to give you the tools that make labeling/tagging a breeze and immediately help your blog come up in the search engine rankings.

Definitions

Tags and Labels: these two mean the exact same things. It just depends on which blogging platform you use.

Blogger: uses the term labels. Below is a screenshot of where you find the place to add LABELS on a blogger site.

Where to find LABELS in Blogger

WordPress: uses the term tags. Below is a screenshot of where you find the place to add TAGS on a FREE WordPress site.

Where to find TAGS in the FREE version of WordPress

WordPress: Below is a screenshot to show you where to find TAGS in a paid WordPress site.

Where to find TAGS in the PAID version of WordPress

Even though successful tagging may seem like a complicated formula—one part magic and two parts luck—it’s more of a game and not nearly as difficult as you may think.

A keyword is like a label. It's a short way—although almost always more than one word in length—to state the purpose of your article/blog post. Posts can have several keyword groups or only one.

Targeted Labels/Tags make your posts easier to find when a topic is typed into a search engine. When your individual blog posts begin showing up in the top, it will drive up the visibility of your site.

The picture below is a screenshot of where my blog post about labels and tags for blogging showed up in a Google search. Just FYI, it's number 4 out of about 9,480,000. Not bad. 

Google search

Warning, Brief Geek Content

To understand how tagging can help your blog post get found (or lost in the sea of other blogs) you do have to understand a little about search engines. Search engines crawl the Internet searching and sorting all the information. In the simplest of terms, the more your information about and on your page matches up, the higher you rank.

Now, for those of you who truly understand search engines, you know this is way over simplifying the concept. Lots of other things come into count when your post is ranked, but tagging correctly will get you way on down the road!

Basics of Proper Labels & Tags

1. Your labels/tags are usually a group of words, not just an individual word.

2. Always use your blog post title as one of your labels/tags.

3. Always us your name as one of your labels/tags.

4. If it’s different from your name, always include your blog title (for example, my blog title is The Write Conversation) as one of the labels/tags.

5. Come up with a couple of phrases that relate to the focus of your individual post.

Here are the labels/tags I used for this specific post:

Why Tags and Labels are Important to Blogging & How to Use Them Correctly, Blogging Basics for Writers, Edie Melson, Social Media Monday, The Write Conversation, Becoming a Professional Writer, 

Don’t forget to join the conversation!

Blessings,

Edie

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