I’ve talked about WordPress tags before both explaining what they are and also how to map them against your categories. But neither of these posts really covered how useful they can be to build up your sites overall map. Tags allow you to further categorise posts in a way that allows you to build separate pages containing specific content.
Creating these separate pages allows for a better user experience if they’re looking for specific content. It can also help in your own mind to know which posts are similar to one another, and you can decide whether to directly link between the posts.
Examples of Tagging Posts
Book Reviews
For book reviews I thought about how people separate their reading and realised that it’s normally by author and genre. Readers often read the same genre over and over, and often have a favourite. They also have favourite authors, or an interest in a specific author. For this reason, tags could be the author name and the genre of the book you’re writing about.
On top of this you could also segment by publisher, by number of pages, by sub-genre, age group etc. Really any way you can segment books, you can segment your book reviews by tags – but focus on the tags that users will actually use. For example, the ‘number of pages’ suggestion may be helpful if you create other posts about books under X pages long – however if you’ve never done that before there’s little chance your readers would be interested. So that wouldn’t be a helpful tag for you to use.
Product Reviews
For product reviews it’s important to tag the kind of product it is. If you’re talking about a face mask, it’s likely that your reader may want to read about other face masks too, so can click the tag which takes them to a page full of face mask content. On top of this, you may want to tag the brand of the product for similar reasons.
Product reviews also depend on what kind of products you’re using, and how you’re reviewing them. A Skincare blog may separate products by the issue the product targets (blackheads, acne, dry skin etc) or the type of skin it’s made for (combination, dry or oily). Whereas a photography blog may separate camera reviews by types of photography it works best with (night, macro, sport etc). Different niches will have varying tags but when you’re creating yours you should always keep in mind “What will be useful for my readers?”.
Editorial Features and Guides
When you’re writing features and guides you can often veer off into more broad subjects, all of which can have tags attributed to them. For example, my Ultimate Guide to Skincare post can utilise many of the same tags I used for product reviews as it contains multiple types of products. For your own features (and guides, discussions and opinion pieces too) you should note down all the topics you cover, as well as have a look through your own tag list to see if any pre-existing tags apply.
How To and List Posts
When you’re creating how to and list posts you’re often creating specific content for a specific topic (although it can sometimes be broader). For example, my Blogging 101 series counts as a How To series – and so I tag it as Blogging 101, because it is a series. How to’s will also cover a topic, so for example this post will be tagged with “SEO” and “Blog Tags” alongside the two posts I mentioned at the start.
This is the same for list posts, I often see “100 blog posts idea” and then “101 more blog post ideas” – both of these should have a tag of “blog post ideas” or “ideas list”, or however you want to tag to look like. As a general rule, it can be helpful to have a tag that links any posts that you have already linked together in some way.
Q&A/AMA
Similar to List Posts, a Q&A or an AMA can be very broad or very specialised depending on questions you’ve chosen. However, you can create a series tag, or even a Q&A/AMA tag. You may not want a whole category for personal posts which ask questions about you, but you can definitely create a tag. This tag is a great way to point readers somewhere to get to know you more.
Infographics/Videos/Other types of content
Blogs aren’t just about the written word anymore, and if you’ve created infographics, podcasts, videos or anything else that’s different then you can tag these as such. Most likely the content will still fit in those categories and tags from other content, but differentiating these from normal content can meet a new audience. Unfortunately not everyone likes written word content! But telling someone you can find all your videos *here* is a good way to entice them onto your blog.
Guest Posts
When you’re allowing guest posts on your blog, they’re most likely writing posts that fit into categories or tags you already use. BUT, you can create a page just for the writer of the guest post by tagging it with their name/online handle. If a reader likes the guest post writing, or even if the guest writer wants to see all their work, they can!
