I’m thinking about tagging my articles in addition to their categorization, but I’m not sure how to do it „correctly“. Some people (such as Luis) use a lot of tags in each article, some of them are even overlapping. On the other hand Theo use about two of them for each article and it can be enough.
Other question is, which tags should I use? Is somewhere their list and is it better to take a look at first, or can I invent my own and use them?
Last but not least – does it really make sense to using them? I think yes, because categorization make sense for me (at least), but tags can be more specific and probably make sense to more of you as well.
Hi Martin! Thanks a bunch for the feedback! Actually, there are a number of reasons why I tend to be rather busy when tagging blog articles I publish or others I decide to bookmark from various other places. Here are some reasons for my prolific tagging:
1. First of all, I don’t use tags from within the blog just yet. Those tags are from Technorati, which means, the more you use the bigger the chances you would have to have your blog posts found by other people. Remember how Technorati allows you to search for content filtered by tags. Very powerful.
2. I use tags with a similar terminology, like social-software, social-networking, social-computing, social-media, because depending on which country or geo you are people would use one term or another. For instance, here in Europe we tend to use more social-computing, whereas in the US it is more social-media… Why would we need to fail reaching out to both audiences? All of that with a couple of tags.
3. The more I tag a particular blog post, the more hints I am giving people about the purpose and subject matter of the article. That means that I always put the tags the last ones, so that I can build up like an index of essential keywords from the article using those tags.
I have got a tendency to create long blog posts, so it helps people quickly scan what they are all about and whether the blog post would be worth while reading through it.
So you can see how I get to tag most of the articles I publish and what’s my reasoning behind it. Hope that helps to clarify what your position may well be. Thanks again for the link love!