Tagging is an extremely easy and powerful way of organising your content, and an essential part of marketing it.
But what is it? Essentially it is a way of categorising your content. Tagging... keywords...categories....all fall within information and knowledge management.
You may already be doing it - tagging your blogs, tagging your YouTube clips, tagging your Delicious bookmarks, tagging your Ever-notes, tagging your photo library. Every social media site, and many of the software programs on your computer will have tagging functionality.
It is used to firstly categorise and then easily find any public or private content or information which you have decided to keep. As an added bonus, it is a great keyword hook in those cases where you want your content to be indexed and found by Google as well as humans! It adds weight in Google's eyes to your content by showing that you have bothered to categorize it.
So how should you create tags?
The more RELEVANT the tags you create for a particular piece of content, the more likely it is that you and others will find it when searching for this information. If you have keywords which you are specifically targeting, make sure that one of your tags reflects these keywords.
How should I tag THIS article?
This is what I have come up with so far....
tag, tagging, social media, information management, knowledge management, online marketing
Note that I have put in both the words tag and tagging - as I want anyone typing in either word to find this article. I also like to create a tag with the broader category or multiple categories I think that the article could come under, which is why I included social media, information management, knowledge management and online marketing.
Important: understand and work with your tag separators. A tag separator is how the program you are using defines the separation between tag keywords. Be very clear about what the tag separators are within the specific context you are in. Some programs use a space, others a comma (this is most common), and others a semi-colon.
See the examples below about how the above tags would be entered in these three examples using the different separator types:
Comma separators:
tag, tagging, social media, information management, knowledge management, online marketing
Semi colon separators:
tag; tagging; social media; information management; knowledge management; online marketing
Occasionally, tags will be only defined with a space. Be careful in this situation to keep tags which have more than one word together by inserting an underscore, or don't leave a space between a tag phrase. See example below:
tag tagging social_media information_management knowledge_management online_marketing or
tag tagging socialmedia informationmanagement knowledgemanagement onlinemarketing
Most tagging systems operate with predictive text, meaning that once you have entered a particular tag, it may suggest this tag when you next go to type in a similar tag. Certainly my Delicious and Evernote tagging systems remember tags I have entered, and in the case of Delicious (and many other programs), tags which others have used to tag that particular content also pop up. It is a good idea to pay attention to these suggested tags, as it shows you exactly what others have used to tag that content. Obviously this is for existing content which has already been in the public domain and not content you have only just created.
One final point. Tagging is a discipline. Do it with any content you may want to access again. Apply the 'do once' rule. When you have content which is useful, tag it straight away. You will then not waste time looking for it again. And remember that you can always go back and add more tags which you think are more appropriate, or remove ones which you think are not relevant.
What other tips for tagging do you have?
It is used to firstly categorise and then easily find any public or private content or information which you have decided to keep. As an added bonus, it is a great keyword hook in those cases where you want your content to be indexed and found by Google as well as humans! It adds weight in Google's eyes to your content by showing that you have bothered to categorize it.
So how should you create tags?
The more RELEVANT the tags you create for a particular piece of content, the more likely it is that you and others will find it when searching for this information. If you have keywords which you are specifically targeting, make sure that one of your tags reflects these keywords.
How should I tag THIS article?
This is what I have come up with so far....
tag, tagging, social media, information management, knowledge management, online marketing
Note that I have put in both the words tag and tagging - as I want anyone typing in either word to find this article. I also like to create a tag with the broader category or multiple categories I think that the article could come under, which is why I included social media, information management, knowledge management and online marketing.
Here is an example of how I have tagged this content in Evernote - where I keep all my content ideas and a record of all my writing...
Important: understand and work with your tag separators. A tag separator is how the program you are using defines the separation between tag keywords. Be very clear about what the tag separators are within the specific context you are in. Some programs use a space, others a comma (this is most common), and others a semi-colon.
See the examples below about how the above tags would be entered in these three examples using the different separator types:
Comma separators:
tag, tagging, social media, information management, knowledge management, online marketing
Semi colon separators:
tag; tagging; social media; information management; knowledge management; online marketing
Occasionally, tags will be only defined with a space. Be careful in this situation to keep tags which have more than one word together by inserting an underscore, or don't leave a space between a tag phrase. See example below:
tag tagging social_media information_management knowledge_management online_marketing or
tag tagging socialmedia informationmanagement knowledgemanagement onlinemarketing
Most tagging systems operate with predictive text, meaning that once you have entered a particular tag, it may suggest this tag when you next go to type in a similar tag. Certainly my Delicious and Evernote tagging systems remember tags I have entered, and in the case of Delicious (and many other programs), tags which others have used to tag that particular content also pop up. It is a good idea to pay attention to these suggested tags, as it shows you exactly what others have used to tag that content. Obviously this is for existing content which has already been in the public domain and not content you have only just created.
One final point. Tagging is a discipline. Do it with any content you may want to access again. Apply the 'do once' rule. When you have content which is useful, tag it straight away. You will then not waste time looking for it again. And remember that you can always go back and add more tags which you think are more appropriate, or remove ones which you think are not relevant.
What other tips for tagging do you have?
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