WordPress Categories and Tags

There’s just no telling where or when your various promotional strategies are going to pay off.  Internet marketing is a cumulative numbers business and one of the most important things to remember is to be methodical.

So when it comes to blogging the way in which you publish your post can have a long term impact on your success.  By that, I mean that just writing a post and hitting the publish button is not going to get you anywhere.  You have to make the post easy to find both for human visitors and for the search engines.

So when you’ve finished your post jst stop to draw breath and remember that you are only half way there.

First off, if you have an autotagging tool then use it.  Save your post as a draft and it should search automatically for relevant tags in your content.  This gives your brain a chance to cool off before you examine the tags it produces and start deleting the irrelevant rubbish which it will inevitably produce while keeping the relevant tags.

Then start using your brain again to add the tags that it has missed using your common sense.  Tags are seriously important because they are the most efficient way for the search engines to search for content.

Next, Categorise your post with relevant categories.  Again, with the right tools Categories can be hierarchical and Categories are most useful for human visitors because we think in a structured way.

Research has demonstrated that our brains resort to ‘chunking’ when overloaded with information.  So we can usually handle up to 7 main ideas at one time before our brains start to ‘lose it’.  This is why we tend to create organisational structure that move from broad subjects down into more detail.  So Categories are for humans and the single level of tags is more efficient for the search engines.

What prompted this post?  It was an email that I got from another website owner telling me that he has created a nice link to this blog and, as we know, every inbound link is precious. But his site is about iPads – so what’s that got to do with this site?

The answer is that I think I have one single post on this site about the iPad and I put it up because it’s just funny. What’s more it’s a YouTube video with no written content.  But I tagged it with ‘apple’ among other things.

And it was the link to the tag page at www.brucebird.com/tag/apple/  that he found when searching on Gigablast.com for sites relevant to his niche of iPad that led him to create a post all about www.brucebird.com that you can see at http://www.appleipadtablets.com/link/brucebird.com

So I got a nice inbound link and as one good turn deserves another I’m giving him one back in this post – which also serves an educational purpose for you, dear reader.

So never rush to print with your posts.  Make sure you go through a methodical process of adding categories and tags.  They are the hooks you provide to help people to find what you are writing about and you never know what the long term benefits might be.

Bruce Bird

You might also find these articles on SEO with WordPress useful:

• WordPress SEO What Makes It So Different? (lanechase.net)
• Learn How WordPress SEO Can Drive the Targeted Visitors You Want To Your Site. (lanechase.net)