My friend Niv Calderon wrote a great post a few days ago about the correct usage of tags and the optimization of text for search engines. Unfortunately, many of you won’t be able to read it because it’s in Hebrew, so we both agreed that it would definitely be worthwhile to translate it for all of you since these tips are so extremely useful. Please note that I’ve edited the post a bit and added a few more pointers.

Think you’ve been tagging correctly up till now? Perhaps you’ll think differently after reading this post.

What Do You Want To Search As Opposed To What Do You Want To Find

Let’s start from the beginning.

Tags are actually smart keywords that are associated with a piece of information on the internet, such as text, pic, or video. Tags describe this information, classify & sort it, and enable search engines to give us the results that we seek even by the word’s context. For example, a search engine already knows from experience that “Nasrallah” is related to “Hezbollah“, and so forth.

Why are tags so important?

In today’s era of RSS and Web pages that are personally suited for each user, we can receive our information through its classification in a completely different manner than we used to in the past (and the past is not so long ago). If in the past (and still today) we subscribed to a blog or newsletter, the subscription still doesn’t promise us that the actual content will interest us. Even if it’s a blogger that we really like, who knows what he’ll write about next. Yet today, due to tags (and RSS) we can get exactly the kind of information we are seeking without being dependent on those blogs that we know and to explore diverse writings of new people who use tags to classify their content.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you like a specific Star Trek show. There are tons of people in the universe who have written about Star Trek but of course you don’t have the time to search through all of these sites. Now there’s a way to get exactly what you want. Technorati (or any other such service) will find for you all the relevant posts that are tagged with the specific term you’re looking for, and if you wish, you can even register to a service that will stream all the relevant posts on the topic to your computer. In other words, if once we used to write in Google the term that we are searching, and scroll down through all the search results, today’s tags have flattened our search world and made it into one where we write in the search box exactly what we want to find.

SEO Or Optimization Of Internet Sites For Search Engines

Search engines know how to read the tags that you add to your posts. They scan all the text word for word and then scan the tags. Your tags are supposed to exactly fit the text that you wrote. Many people think that flooding their posts with tags will only encourage search engines to get to these posts. For instance, if you write a post about Jerry Seinfeld and you put the tag “web 2.0″, it is logical that whoever is looking for web 2.0 will get to your blog at some point. Right? Wrong. Exactly the opposite.

Bloggers who abuse tags on a regular basis are detected by search engines. Google’s system is smart. If we take Google’s Page Rank for example, it gives ranking to internet pages based on the number of links that point to it, and amongst other things, is also based on the connection between the metadata and the text. Yes, you heard right - Metadata. In the site’s metadata, the site owner tells search engines (and also the surfers) what exists on his site and what they can expect. When there is no “fit” between this information and the actual content on the site, the search engine gives you “negative points”, views you as less credible, and ranks you lower in the search results. This of course affects the traffic coming into your site. For example, if you wrote one post about Brad Pitt’s latest movie, one post about shopping, and one post about your car, you could see why the search engine would view you as less credible if you added “Web 2.0″ as one of your tags, right? (Another point I will add here: The search engine doesn’t just scan your post. It scans the entire page and also your archive, so if you you usually write about Web 2.0 and you put Web 2.0 as one of the tags in a post that didn’t necessarily contain the term but still was related to it, don’t be worried).

Remember to be exact and consistent. If you used the sentence “Brad Pitt’s latest movie” in your post, use the exact same words in your tags. “Brad Pitt’s latest movie” is not the same as “Brad Pitt’s recent movie”. The best tip I can give you is to simply copy paste the words as they are without rewriting them. (Another point I will add here: Think about your tags as you write your post. If you want to use a certain tag, make sure to place it in your text. It’s a different way of looking at writing, I know, but if traffic is important to you, you should definitely consider this).

Recently a trend has emerged on the Web where people use tags as an addition to their post. There are those who use locations, figures, etc., as a way to explain more about the post (I admit, I’ve done this as well). There are those who will use the subtext of their post as a long sentence tag. While we can’t fight this trend, just like we can’t fight the emergence of slang words, we can still explain to these people that writing complete sentences will not help promote or classify their posts. It will only have the opposite effect and create a minor sub-category in which these posts will be classified.

Be precise and exact with your tags. This will help surfers get to your blog and make search engines love you. More exact tags, more traffic. Think about it.

Now I will add some tags to this post based on all that I’ve learned and hopefully, I’ll do it right.

Thanks to Eszter for the pic.

Technorati tags: tags, tagging, niv calderon, blog, text optimization, search engine, tips, search, keywords, rss, web 2.0, blogger, post, technorati, google, seo, Optimization Of Internet Sites, page rank, metadata, traffic

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