Just for the record, although even WordPress refers to “Technorati Tags” in the Codex offering more than a dozen related plugins, del.icio.us was actually one of the first introducers of “tags” (keywords related to and attached to or embedded in posts). And while if you use tags and ping Technorati your posts/pages/site if added to the directory, will be classified according to your tags, there is no longer a requirement for these tags to point back to Technorati. Which is good news, because the traffic from Technorati is generally more of a trickle than a flood, not near enough to justify what used to be quite serious traffic leaks.

Tag Strategy

What if any value can tags serve, apart from controlling classification in some blog directories? First they might offer a small search engine edge if handled correctly, in that tags chosen (as they should be) from words which actually appear in your text, will in turn cause WordPress to generate pages based around those tags. Such pages by definition share at least some tags/keywords in common which might result in a concentration that might give you a decent SE placing.

Lots of emphasized uses of the word “might” there. Two reasons. The first is that it is near impossible to control the keyword density of those pages, so they are very unlikely to hit the ideals purely by coincidence. You could even end up being penalized for stuffing. Second, there is a growing school of opinion (I haven’t decided how credible it is) which says that if Google finds the same posts on your site via different routes (ie via category and date (and tags), as well as in their original date order, you could be penalized for duplicate content. The response to this belief is to place noindex metas (using a plugin) on all but main and single-post pages. Bye-bye any SE edge there could have been. Not everyone will agree, but in my view the best use of tags is to treat them as an extension of your categories.

Basic site navigation should be kept simple because too many options make it difficult for the surfer to choose. Crazy as it might sound, he may leave your site rather than make that choice. With that in mind, it is a good idea to restrict your categories to no more than a dozen, but that may well not be near enough to filter your visitors as effectively as possible, nor even give them a proper idea of all that your site has to offer. Tags to the rescue!

With tags, you can even say to hell with convention and apply tags to articles based on a list of keywords/phrases you have decided to use as effectively sub-categories. Don’t worry about whether or not these words appear in the text. Or you can play by the rules and restrict yourself to words from the text, still in effect creating sub-categories. Keep the tags per post between 3 and 6 (again for the sake of simple choices) and list these tags under each article (much easier) or embed them in the text (possibly more effective). Chosen wisely, you are then offering your visitors a tempting way to dig deep into your site, while at the same time allowing them a chance to define their interests more precisely. Try not to go too wild selecting different keywords for each and every post, because there really is no point in sending surfers to a page which may only contain the post we was originally reading. Even exercising some control you will likely still end up with dozens of tags on your site. Enough already :)

Tag Clouds

These are those collections, often of different-sized and/or different colored links, such as the one you can see on the right of this page. Tucked discretely out of the way or displayed on their own page, they serve much the same purpose as a site map: of limited interest to most visitors but a decent way to ensure search engines have short paths to all your content. To actually put them under the surfers’ noses is more questionable and I do it here mainly because I want features I know I shall mention occasionally, to be built into the site so they can be seen.

Webmasters tend to think they are “cool” and possibly surfers did too while they were a novelty. But unless the cloud is kept small enough that it will exclude many tags anyway, it soon becomes another case of information overload. Think carefully about if and how you use them.