As anyone who has ever introduced regular fresh content onto their site will know, the work of fresh content isn’t over when it’s written. There’s also selection of appropriate link anchors, formatting, distribution, categorising and tag selection.

Tag selection for your articles is one thing it is possible to plan even in the design stages of content production. If your SEO consultant has mapped out a content plan as part of your search engine optimisation strategy, you may have keywords allocated to particular topics. A rough outline of the tags for a piece of content can be drawn up from these, and built on once the content is written.

Often, tags can be the same as your keywords for the content, although it can be worth branching out. For example, with this article, the keywords might be ‘keywords’, ‘fresh content’ and ‘tag selection.’ However, that’s not solely what the article is about. The article comes under a bigger category of SEO, so ‘SEO’ and ’search engine optimisation’ would be good tags to include. More broadly, ‘writing advice’ is a good tag to describe the aim of the article, and so perhaps ‘online publishing,’ ‘online content’ and ‘SEO copywriting’ might be good tags to include.

As you see, tags can include related concepts, category titles and sometimes even antonyms. Tags are great for directing the attention of search engine spiders. Any tags that will help your user classify the content are warranted. All of the tags in the above example would provide the user with information on the article at a glance, helping them to decide whether the content would be useful to them. Tags are a great way to advertise.

Tags can also provide an interactive element to your content. Some websites allow readers to tag content as they go. This can be a way to further optimise your content as users may provide tags you haven’t thought of. It can also be more trouble than it’s worth, depending on your target users.

If you plan on publishing fresh content on individual pages, don’t forget to prepare your meta description tag. This doesn’t have to be a big issue, as not all search engines pay particular attention to meta description tags, but it’s worth spending a little time on if you want to keep as much control as possible of how search engines handle your content. If you are strapped for time, the first paragraph is a good start for the meta description tag. If you have a little more time, take the first paragraph and streamline it, making sure to include a few keywords.

Optimally-tagged content can make posting content easier, as generally one tag will provide a category. If you have a large amount of content on your site, is a good idea to categorise your content as well as tagging it. This provides users with a way of accessing related content without drawing out everything that has that tag. It can be helpful to have expert knowledge on board when tagging and designing content. Talk to us at SEO Consult when you want to consider your site’s content options.

Get Involved