Before I go on, I love Kristen Lamb‘s advice on blogging to build a brand. She’s excellent, and has really helped me make a better blog.
Doesn’t change that there’s one issue I disagree on: Tags.
She suggests using all the tags we want associated with us on the posts we write. Were this ten years ago, I’d agree, since the ‘meta tag’ was one of the more important elements on a website. Today, however, their importance is diminishing, and may have a number of serious drawbacks!
Tags duplicate information
In general, if you’re blogging with a focus, the information in your tags is duplicated in the body of your post! For example, I talk about blogging on a regular basis. If you’ll notice, I mention the words ‘your blog’ quite often in my blogging related posts. Google, and most other search engines, are good about reading your content and picking keywords out of the body of text.
Here’s a video from Google:
There might be better navigation tools
Modern tags are also used to help readers navigate a blog. Click on a tag and see a list of posts using that tag. This is a cool feature, up until you have dozens of tags on a wide variety of topics. Now your reader needs to find the right tag to find the posts they’re looking for! This comes back to making it easy on the reader.
If you look to the left, I’ve got a menu called ‘Categories.’ Each of those headings offers a series of posts under the chosen Category, which allows you to easily navigate my blog for like content. In each category, I make my titles descriptive in some way to make sure you can find content that interests you.
They might look like ‘Keyword Stuffing’
Here’s where they really might hurt you. Google uses ‘Page rank’ to determine how high in Google you rate. One of the things they look for to knock you down is called keyword stuffing, which is the practice of putting as many unrelated keywords as possible into a single page to draw traffic from search engines. Anyone who used to surf during the nineties will remember this practice, getting to a website that had nothing to do with what you were searching for, even though the Google preview mentioned your keywords.
Okay, so I’ve given you a bunch of reasons why not, but I hate critiques without some sort of answer offered, so how do I suggest you get those keywords that really make your brand into your website? You know ‘Patrick Thunstrom, Fantasy Author.’ Simple: Make an ‘about me’ section, either in your posts or in your sidebar. This is a great place for your ‘short bio’ Kristen Lamb suggests in her book We Are Not Alone.
Doing this puts your keywords in a prominent position in a way that relates to the content of your page, and avoids all the disadvantages of tags!
obviously i agree with you here bro! rock on!
Sorry, I didn’t really understand the post. One of the biggest reasons I have writers come up with tag words is that it becomes easier to see a holistic picture of who that author really is and can help us formulate a log-line.
For instance if a writer lists:
unicorns, fantasy, journals, memoir, flowers, kittens, writing, gardening
That gives a very different feel than a writer who lists:
X-Box, Kung-Fu, gaming, thrillers, James Bond, ninjas, motorcycles
For the way I teach at least, the tags have less to do with the Internet and more to do with what persona we are creating on-line. I know the Internet is always evolving and changing, and that is one of the biggest challenges when we write about social media. We are a dog chasing a car it can never catch, which is why I blog regularly to keep people updated.
Thanks for the thoughtful post. Always eager to learn more.
I totally agree with getting the keywords. Mixing them into your posts and profiles is a great idea. I mean specifically the meta-data tags, such as would normally be at the bottom of a blog post. The videos I linked to have some more specific information from Google, I’m thinking I should actually add it to the post itself.
Yeah, I am glad you have written this. There is so much information and it is a killer keeping up….ego why teams are such a vital asset.
Sorry, was a little fried when I read this yesterday. Needed time to think, and maybe you can answer a couple questions. One of the reasons I recommend that people use meta tags is that, yes Google searches in the body of a post for key words, but it will list those tagged first, ahead of those who just have the words in the first paragraphs. Has that changed?
Also, sometimes I might not be using a certain key word in a post, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a taget audience. For instance, whenever I am talking about blogging, I list all forms of publishing in the tags–I.e., “self-publishing.” I might not use that word, but if someone googles:
“Blogging for self-publishing” then likely my post will appear. I list a lot of tags that are tangentially related to my posts.
I think I will always list that cloud tag simply because the human eye SEES everything, even if we are not consciously aware–thus a clod of tags with key words for my brand near my posts serves as a subconscious reinforcement.
BUT, of course I would love to know if SEO has changed its ways.
Thanks.
While I can’t say for sure, the problem is when you have tag clouds which could have dozens or hundreds of tags which may or may not be closely related. I’ll do more research and definitely update on this topic eventually.
My cloud (when I have one, LOL) only uses the ones I employ the most, though. So if you look on my blog, you really only see the words I would associate with my brand.
Keep me posted!