Tagging 101 (Tag, Your Shit)

My post about tagging was understood and WTF’ed in equal measure. I was trying to use Technorati tags as an easy way to define ‘blog’ and then use them to comment on the state of sex blogging.

Some of you (and you know who you are you demanding, foxy, bitches) wanted to know more about tagging so here – on an eight mince pie day (I disgust myself and no Americans, mincemeat doesn’t contain any meat), here’s a little more on tagging.

Tags are categories. On their simplest level, tags are just categories, but unlike traditional categories, you can invent tags to suit each post you make, which allows you to make them post specific. Generally the more specific a tag is, the more useful it is (’Chunky Black Asses’ is more useful than just ‘Chunky Asses’, especially when you’re looking for video clips of Nubian butt.)

Tags help search engines. Tags are metadata, which is the way self-important undergraduates say information about information (if my collection of ‘Mini Muffs and Mighty Men’ magazines is data, that I collect dwarf porn is the metadata). That means if you write something funny, but don’t use the word funny, but then tag it funny, someone typing ‘funny’ into a search engine has a hope in hell of finding it. They also free you up from feeling you have to SEX! litter your PORN! posts with FUCKING! keywords.

Tags can be internal or external. This is where I lost a few people last time. Don’t worry, I’ve really explained this already (reading this is like having sex with me. By the time we’re discussing what you want to object to, I’ve done it and you’re smiling.) Tags can either be written to help users find content – internal tags (SugarBank’s an example. Those tags on the far right are for you), or they can be written to satisfy search engines – external tags.

For example, though technically everything at SugarBank concerns sex and porn, I don’t tag every post that way because doing so would make it harder for people to find posts about sex and porn specifically. What I’m calling external tagging is aimed at letting people know about what’s in your blog before they visit it, while internal tags are aimed at guiding people through your blog.

(You can tag for internal and external use simultaneously, by hiding the external tags from visitors so they don’t get in the way. The best of both worlds, as they say at the Ping-Pong bar in Sydney.)

Tags are easy. Okay, that’s a lie – adding tags to a website from scratch would be a nightmare, but most blogging systems offer easy ways to add tags, and many add categories as tags automatically.

Tags are newsworthy. Technorati, de.lico.us and many other similar sites help people navigate the web by organizing websites using tags. If you tag in a way those sites will understand, they’ll add you to their index, providing a free, targeted, incoming link to content people are looking for. A reliable alternative to fellating the Googlebot.

So although tagging won’t make you famous, shoot your blog to the top of Google, or make your bits any bigger (I measure every day), it will make your blog easier to find, navigate and read – in my view, well worth doing.

Popularity: 43% [?]