A tag is defined as a relevant keyword or term used to describe or associate with an article, picture, or video clip. The purpose of every tag is to classify the article, picture, or video and help visitors and users find information in the same category. In a way, a tag works like a keyword or a category label.

Tags are very prevalent in blogs and social sites for this purpose. They can be displayed as navigation in what is commonly called a tag cloud. Tag clouds display each tag or keyword in different font sizes. This difference in font sizes implies the number of times the keyword or tag has been used. Tags that are used many times are larger than those not often used.

Clicking on a tag will lead a visitor onto a page where associated information is shown for the visitor to choose from. Usually, it is the most recent associated articles, pictures, or videos that are shown. Other social sites, however, opt to show information that are more relevant than the others first (e.g. Youtube).

Tags also come with their “related tags.” A tag is always shown with another tag that is related to it to give the visitors more options on what to search for.

Tagging For SEO

Tagging is not only useful for visitors. It is also used in search engine optimization.

Tagging allows a user to bring in more link flows to your site. The presence of tags and a tag cloud is very effective in terms of search engine optimization. This is because these tags are textual and keyword-rich. It brings in more structure to the keyword links in your site.

Through this, tagging can significantly increase a website’s traffic. Through the tags it can achieve visibility in a vast array of search terms. Choosing a relevant keyword as a tag for your content and it will gain you instant rankings.

Tag conjunction pages can also add some traffic to your site. Tag conjunction pages are automatically made when there are multiple posts with two tags in common. In displaying the links that are not just connected to the related tag pages but will also lead to conjunctions between related tags, more pages are shown to the search engine crawlers.

When Visitors Do the Tagging…

There are sites that allow tagging to be done by visitors. Social networking and bookmarking sites are the leaders in this category. While this is a good thing for the visitors, it may not always be a good thing for your site. Some disadvantages of having visitors do the tagging are the following:

Visitors sometimes use tags that only have relevance to themselves and not to other visitors. For example, a visitor puts in a tag “john’s party.” Obviously, this is only for the tagger’s use and not for anyone else’s.

The tags become inconsistent. They are misspelled, others have hyphens, and there are visitors who would tag a rather obscure synonym.

The visitors may not know how to choose the right keywords to tag.

There are sites, however, that still rises in the ranks even when it is the visitors who do the ranking. Amazon.com is a great example for this. This is because, despite the disadvantages, tagging still presents itself as a useful and competitive tool for both the users and search engine optimization.

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