When most Web designers, site builders and bloggers think of Tags, it’s in relation to SEO, search engine optimization. Tags are used by search engines and sites to find related material.
Many blogs display a Tag Cloud like the one in the image. The larger the text, the more posts with that tag. Posts that you tag with the same words would be linked from those Tags in the cloud, providing more internal links on the site, a help with SEO. It’s a bit like a visual index, with the ability to zero in better on specific information.
Categories are general groupings, kind of like file cabinet drawers. Tags should be more specific, like individual file folders in the drawer. If you start out with a Tagging plan, you can create some really powerful navigation for your visitors as the number of posts grows on your site. You can cut down on the number of sub-categories and still provide single links to very specific lists of posts about narrow topics.
I didn’t catch on to this until there were well over 1000 posts on my real estate site, so I haven’t gone back and tried to take advantage of this powerful tool. That’s why the image of a tag cloud above is from another site I built about the Rocky Mountains. Notice that tags like “coffee shops,” and “home decor” allow me to be more specific about the content of that post without having to create a sub-category under Restaurants for “Coffee Shops.”
As it does with category pages, WordPress creates a Tag page when it’s called for, with the newest posts at the top going backward in time. If I mouse over that “coffee shops” tag, here’s what the page link looks like: http://rockymountainplaces.com/tag/coffee-shops/. And, here’s the way the first couple of posts look on the page:
I don’t use Tag Clouds, as I don’t think they’re that useful. However, now that I know that WordPress creates the tag page URL like the one above, I can create links in my text to specific tags to take my visitor to highly relevant information. I just type out the URL for the site, adding “/tag/tag-text/” to it. You can also create a Menu item for navigation if you want using the URL of the tag display page. Let’s think about this in relation to your real estate website needs.
Let’s say that you have a category for Neighborhoods, and people can view all of the posts you’ve placed in that category, which would include a lot of posts about all types of things. You might have posts about shopping in a neighborhood, or schools, or average home prices. Instead of worrying about a dizzying number of sub-categories, you can use tags to get your visitors to the information they want very quickly. Using “Name” to be the Neighborhood name:
1. NameSchools or nameschools
2. NamePrices or nameprices
Now, if I want to put a link in a post I’m writing to take someone to the schools information for a certain neighborhood, it would look like this: http://mysite.com/tag/NameSchools . They’ll see only the posts that I’ve tagged that way, and they’ll be very focused on what they want. You can also place this link in your sidebar next to specific pages about neighborhoods, on the page itself, or both.
Why didn’t I make my tags two words in my examples, like “Name Schools or name schools?” I want to use these tags for this specific navigation purpose, so I want them to be unique and not confused with other more general tags I’m using, like just “schools,” and “prices.” I still use these more general tags, and I’ll show you why in a moment. However, for my linking, I want to be very specific, and combining the words into one without spaces creates a unique bit of text. Using capital letters is a personal preference that makes it easier for me to read them.
Think for a moment about how powerful this can be. I am lazy by nature, and I also try hard to create systems that make sure that I do what I want to do, but they make it faster and easier so that I’m sure to do it. So, knowing I’ll be writing a LOT of information in a great number of posts about a huge number of topics and sub-topics, I need a way to arrange it later without a lot of effort as I write.
By planning my tagging, I can keep a cheat sheet handy and tag my posts properly when I write them so that I don’t have to think about how they’re arranged later. Also, when you’re writing a post, in the tagging section you’re able to click a dropdown and see all of your tags and just click on one to use it. However, when you have 100+ tags like I do, I’d rather have a system that makes it faster for me to just type them. So, my cheat sheet might look like this:
1. For neighborhood schools “NeighborhoodSchools”
2. For negotiation topics “NegotiateRepairs,” “NegotiatePrice,” “NegotiateContingencies,” etc.
3. For transaction topics “TransactTitle,” “TransactInspect,” “TransactAppraisal,” etc.
You’re getting the point, and after a while I don’t even need the cheat sheet. It’s an organized thought process for tagging that makes sure everything is filed away for easy retrieval and display. You don’t have to be this elaborate if you don’t want to, but if you plan on building out a large site, starting right really takes little effort and will bring rewards later.
By Jim Kimmons on February 9, 2023.
Exported from Medium on May 3, 2023.
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