Something I want to bring to the forefront of your mind for your blog.
I made my first blog back in early 2006, but had no idea what I was doing. I had a couple thoughts on what I should and shouldn’t do, but that was about it. When confronted with making my first couple of posts, there was the “category” box and the “tags” box. I thought to myself, “Eh, both are the same thing, why do I need to post the same word twice? I’ll just throw everything in “Category” and try not to overlap on words too much.”
Big mistake.
Want to know what that most likely cost me? Search Engine traffic, targeting choice words when I “tagged” posts, interlinking between other sites, and possibly some of my audience.
I did not have this concept really nailed down until I launched this blog. I wanted to be sure and do this the “right way” and not screw up and pass over advice taught to me by my mentors.
The concept is this: Categories categorize your posts, Tags describe what your post is about.
Your blog should have a set amount of categories from the very start, while tags can be virtually unlimited. Now that doesn’t mean go all crazy on tags, but it does mean that you should choose some targeted keywords to describe your post. Imagine someone searching on Google for your post. Have it described just right, and they will hit your site every time. Have a whole bunch of words thrown in there and they won’t click on it at all, as a matter of fact, it might be buried at the last page of results.
Don’t make the mistake I did and ignore tags entirely, or you will pay for it by an entire evening of corrections made to existing content on your blog.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you use tags and categories in your posts?
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