How to tag your blog posts

What are tags and why are they important?

Tags are specific keywords within your website. Tags help a page visitor to locate content more easily. But don’t get confused. Tags are not like hashtags. When hashtags are being searched, hundreds and thousands of social accounts show up that used that specific hashtag.

Tags work differently. Think of it like this: Tags are local and hashtags are global. Tags are used to locate specific content on a blog while hashtags are used to locate specific content on various accounts.

Tags are mainly important for blogs that contain a lot of content. They aren’t as necessary on small blogs, but it’s still advisable to start using them at an early age as it could save you time in the long run.

How should I use hashtags?

It’s pretty simple! Tags can be used as hashtags, but you can add more than one keyword per tag. For instance, if you are writing about a cooking recipe, your hashtags on Instagram would be #cooking #recipe. With tags, you could type it as follows “cooking recipe”.

Think of it like this: Pretend you are a page visitor and you are on your favorite cooking blog. You are looking for a specific recipe for baked potatoes. Searching “baked potatoes recipe” on the website’s search bar would help you to locate the post about baked potatoes.

In conclusion, put yourself in your viewers’ shoes. Ask yourself “What are they likely to search when they want to come across on the current post that I am writing”? Those are the tags you should consider adding.
Here’s a list of keywords I would use if I had to write about a baked potato recipe: “baked potatoes”, “baked potato recipe”, “baked potatoes recipe”, “recipe with potatoes”, “easy baked potato recipe”, “potatoes”. You are not limited with tags! Use as many tags as you’d like.

Bounce Rate

But keep in mind, using misleading tags could increase your bounce rate. What is bounce rate you might ask?

Bounce rate is a metric that measures the percentage of people who land on your website and leaves right after. So they don’t click on a menu item, a ‘read more’ link or any other internal links on the page. This means that the Google Analytics server doesn’t receive a trigger from the visitor. So basically, this is a bad thing. Avoid misleading tags at all times.

Here’s an example of misleading tags. Let’s say you are writing a blog about baked potatoes, and you use the following tags: “how to cook bacon”. People are searching that keyword on the search bar of your website and then they come across your baked potatoes blog post. The user wouldn’t be interested in that post as they did not search for baked potato recipes.

With that being said, I hope you found this article helpful. To learn more about web solutions and web design tips, read the next article here!

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