Nora Brown Design

New Screencast: Tag your site

My new screencast shows you how to manage tags on your site, including:

• Deleting tags
• Consolidating or replacing tags
• Editing tags

View Tagging your site

NOTE: if your tag management utility looks different from the one in the screencast, you probably have an older version of the plugin. I can updated it in a jiffy.

Tags vs. Keywords

As I mention in the video, tags aren’t the same as keywords. Tags are a navigational tool that your site’s visitors can use to find the content that interests them. Keywords are part of the metadata on a web page that is invisible to site visitors.

Though in Textpattern both your meta keywords and your tags are generated from an article’s “Keywords” field, it’s best to focus tags, and not worry about keywords. I say this for two reasons:

1. Google, the most popular search engine, doesn’t care about meta keywords. They aren’t even listed on their page about meta tags
2. Google and your users care about good content that is easy to navigate.

Here is a great quote from a Google employee, from this thread

Don’t bother with keyword meta tags. They are a relic and best left
ignored. Why not spend your time writing more unique and compelling
content for your users or improving the features on your site.

That’s pretty definitive. Here are some guidelines for choosing tags:

• Keep them relevant. Ask yourself: “If someone found my article via a search on this tag, would the article be likely to interest them?”
• Keep them consistent. Don’t use singular and plural forms of the same noun, or different tenses of the same verb, etc.
• Be careful with spelling.