Like many, I assign categories to all my posts but I lag a little when it comes to tagging because, well, it’s boring and I hate doing it. But tags are important to help you organize your posts and help readers find archived posts when the categories simply don’ t give enough information. Tags are also part of a good SEO system (search engine optimization - getting higher on search results); even though some bots and crawlers don’t rely too heavily on tags since they have been abused in the past, they are still indexed and do help drive traffic to your site.
Post Tags
Many people ask what the difference between categories and tags and it can be a bit fuzzy. A category is the topic of your post, a high level summary. The tags are a list of anything that is mentioned in the post and anything people might search Google for, such as specific people, websites, plug-ins, products, locations or events.
I had no intention of trolling through 800+ posts to tag the ones I have already written. WP Calais Archive Tagger is a Wordpress Plug-in that will search the content of your previous posts and add relevant tags to each one. It is fun to watch it generate the tags for each post and made me look back to figure out what I wrote on the post that it tagged “Tia, Toronto, conductive paint, in-the-car panic attacks, Christmas and electrophoresis.”
Going forward I plan on using the Tagaroo Tag plug-in, also from the Calais community, that will suggest tags for the new post as I write and even allow me to look up relevant Flickr images right on the write-post page.
Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions
Meta tags are the invisible tags viewable only by bots and crawlers indexing your site and help determine the categories and search results your site should be included in and the relative position on the search results page. To manually add Meta tags in Wordpress:
1. On your Wordpress admin, click the design tab, and the theme editor sub-tab.
2. Select the Header Template
3. In the header you will see the following:
<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php wp_title(); ?></title>
4. Directly under this, enter your meta tags. The resulting code would appear as follows:
<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php wp_title(); ?></title>
<meta name=”description” content=”A description of your site“>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Keywords, words, describing, your,
site“></head>
The words in bold must be replaced by a quick description line and the keywords you want to use.
If your template doesn’t look like this, or you are using blogger instead of Wordpress, just add the meta tags and description in the format of the code shown above just below the <head> tag and you should be good.
INstead of doing this manually, you could use a meta tag plug-in, such as the
Add-Meta-Tags WordPress Plugin. This is a slightly more comprehensive solution as it adds tags to single post pages, template pages and archive pages too. But though plug-ins are great, the more you have the more chance you will have for an incompatible plug-in clash that shuts down the site until you disable it so it is good to know how to do it by hand, too.
Alt Image Tags
When an image is not able to load, the alt image text is what is displayed instead. These tags, along with the image title are what search engines use to find relevant pictures when people search image engines such as Google images. Again, you can go back and alt tag all your old images or, as always, you can be a lazy-ass like me and find a plug-in to do it for you.
SEO Friendly images will add the alt image tag to your old and new images based on the title of the image and the title of the post. It is best to hand-tag them in the future so you can make more relevant tags, but for the 800+ posts I have already written, this will do fine for me. Maybe I’ll get around to hand-tagging all my past images. Maybe I’ll get around to scrubbing all the baseboards in my house and cleaning all the windows by hand too.
