Blog Post Tagging: Four Questions for the Perf Community

By ryancaldwellBlogging

I’ve learned a lot from the Performancing community since becoming an active member in April. Some of my favorite threads have been the ones where I ask questions and seek your thoughts and opinions.

Collective knowledge is usually the best knowledge. Consensus usually develops around what works and what doesn’t work. So my hope is to make this a weekly feature at Performancing.

This week’s 4 questions are related to tagging:

  1. Is it still important to use in-post tagging (besides category tagging)?
  2. If so, do you automate this or do it manually?
  3. For maximum effectiveness (i.e. technorati), do tags need to show up on the main page and category pages instead of just the post pages.
  4. What plugins/tools do you use to make tagging an efficient process and strategically effective (targeted).

12 thoughts on “Blog Post Tagging: Four Questions for the Perf Community”

  9. Raj, I agree.

    Jamie, I find that technorati doesn’t pick up my tags unless they are listed on the front page of my site…if I only list the tags on the post, technorati doesn’t see them for some reason.

  10. Technorati tags are wholly unnecessary. Any tags your posts have should point to your own website, not someone else’s. Else Technorati gets the benefits of thousands of bloggers linking to them for endless categories.

  11. 1. I use wordpress categories for tagging, mainly because I don’t see the point in listing by category, when my subject range is quite diverse. I simply call categories tags, and the situation resolves.

    2. I manually tag, I think tagging must be done manually to ensure accuracy and context

    3. I think it helps, in terms of usability, if tags appear on the main page, I think the effectiveness is neither here nor there though. As long as they appear on the post page it should have no effect on the blog post in external applications.

    4.I don’t really use anything.

  12. 1. I think the topic of categories versus tags has been discussed a lot, but here’s my take. Categories should be broad. Typically, not too many categories should appear in a blog. However, tagging is much more specific to the post. I think with the lack of tagging functionality in the base WordPress install (okay, I’m talking about WordPress because that’s what I use), many people just use the categories as tags. I’m definitely guilty of that and after wracking up something like 500 posts over 50-odd categories, reorganizing the whole structure is pretty tedious and intimidating. I’m trying to change that, at least for articles I’ve written since, using UTW for tags and limiting my categories to probably somewhere around 10-15.

    2. I manually tag, although UTW allows you to pull the category as a tag automatically. I also use the Similar Posts plugin that automatically searches for keywords throughout and matches them with other articles with similar keywords, so in effect, it’s sort of like internal tagging.

    3. Not sure about this. Perhaps someone with more experience can share their thoughts on this.

    4. I use Ultimate Tag Warrior, although I presume when WP 2.3 is released, I’ll probably just use the built-in system.

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