Top Five Tag Myths

Quick Tech Primer
If you are going to write a business blog, it is important to understand that you are writing for a couple of audiences. The first audience to read a business blog is a reader. The content you write needs to be engaging and interesting to the reader so they stay and learn. But the other important audience for a blog is the search engines. You have to understand how the search engine works so you can properly tag your sites.

Before we learn how to do this, let's review Tag Myths versus the Tag Facts.

Tag Myths, Tag Facts

Myth: Tags are used for  making blogs easy to navigate.
Fact: Tags are single words (you can do more than one word, but most people don't because using quotes is a nuisance for Del.icio.us users) for providing hints for social bookmark sites. Tags are used to help users of sites like Del.icio.us or Technorati.com quickly categorize your website. Organizing your site by tag probably is a good way to make the site make little sense.

Myth: Tags and Keywords are the same thing.
Fact: Keywords are used to make your site easier to search. Tags are used as organization hints for social bookmark users. Sometimes your tags and keywords are the same thing. Most of the time, though, keywords tend to make more sense to humans and tags tend to be a collection of words. For example: your keyword is "SARBOX compliance software" your tags should be "software sarbox accounting sarbanes-oxley". Oh, and long tail tags don't really work that well.

Myth: You should select tags the same way you select keywords for your website.
Fact: Tags are used to categorize bookmarks on sites like Del.icio.us. People do not use tags the same way as keywords - they use them to indicate broad topics or emotions instead of specifics. Your tags should make it easy for someone to quickly categorize your article in their links, not as some kind of tool for telling Google what your site is about. Take a look at Del.icio.us and look what tags people are assigning to links there - you'll be amazed how broad the tags are.

Myth: Tags should be part of my search engine optimization strategy.
Fact: Using tags to game Google for higher search position is probably not going to work out for you. Most short single word keywords are incredibly difficult to optimize for and Google has been on to tag stuffing and other third rate SEO trickery for several years. On top of that, users of social bookmarking sites will simply create their own tags if they don't like yours.

Myth: Tags are a waste of time.
Fact: There are millions of users of sites like Digg.com, Del.icio.us and Technoriati.com. Users of these sites share bookmarks (read, their bookmark of your website) with their friends. And they can have 534,391 friends they share with. On top of that, Google and other search engines seem to smile on sites that come up often in social bookmark sites.