Blog taxonomy in a nutshell. The importance of tags and categories.

[brainshrub]

Note to DUers, there IS a way to place tags in DU Journals. I've been experimenting, and I want to run it by Elad first. In the meantime, please read this so that you'll understand why the tags are important in the first place.



Today we are going to discuss "blog-taxonomy" and its importance. If you understand the concept, it will increase your site's traffic and repeat visitors significantly.

"Taxonomy" is the study of classifying living things. "Blog-taxonomy" is the study of how to organize your blog for the only two types of readers there are on the internet: Humans and Search Engines.*

For the sake of this discussion, let's break down a blogs taxonomy hierarchically into three parts.

1. Blog Topic: The primary topic, or niche, of your blog.
--Example: Brainshrub.com is a progressive political blog that features counterpoints with most commentary and analysis.

2. Category: The overall subject of a particular blog post.
--Example: This post titled "Respect Your Food" is filed under "Animal Rights" AND "Guest Bloggers". (Look at the top part of the post, right under the title, to see the categories.)

3. Tags: Specific subjects mentioned within a post.
--Example: that post mentioned above has the following tags: chicken - food - cooking - fast food - vegetarian - respect - farming - life - chicken fries - Burger King (Look at the bottom of the post to see the listed tags.)

Just because you don't have your blog organized neatly does not mean that search engines won't refer traffic to you. These days, the most important factor in determining your blogs relevance is by counting the number of people who link to your blog. These are known as an "inbound links".

So, for example, if a user is looking for information about "BBQ" and 10 bloggers have linked to the site "BBQ-for-dinner.com", as opposed to one link for "BBQ-barn.org" - it's likely that the first site will get more traffic referred to it by Google.

If inbound links are the primary determiner of search engine ranking, why bother with blog-taxonomy in the first place?

Because categories and tags help search engines put your work into context, and, make your site easier to navigate. If inbound links could be imagined as gold, then tags and categories can be thought of as silver and pearls.

To use this blog as an example, let's say you are intrigued with this post and you want to peruse the rest of the "Tips For Political Bloggers" series. Instead of slogging through an archive, all you need to do is go to Brainshrub.com, and click the category at the top of this post - and bam - the entire series is now available.



Or, suppose that you would like to see all the posts on Brainshrub.com that are categorized under "Democrats". Go ahead and look in the upper-right hand corner of this page, and you'll see a "site map"... notice how this blog is broken down on the site map category-by-category.

Some categories have nothing in them. That's okay, I'm giving search engines context as to what this blog is about. Besides, inevitably those categories will get filled with something.

Search engines love site maps the way credit-card companies love college students with wealthy parents; they spend a lot more time with them.

But site maps are not the only things categories can do.

Suppose you want to see what this blog spends most of it's time talking about. Note that just under the top banner of Brainshrub.com there is a tab called "tags". If you follow that link, you will be brought to the "Tag Cloud". The more bold-faced and larger the font is, the more often that category is mentioned.

Now would be a good time to say that tags fulfill many of the same functions categories do. (In fact, it's more common to see a tag-cloud broken down by tag, rather than category as is done on this site.) It's just that categories are more general, were tags are specific. For example, a blog post categorized under "Drugs" might have "Aspirin, Alcohol and Ritalin" as tags.

You'll note at the bottom of most of the blog posts on Brainshrub.com are a series of Technorati tags. They are represented as hyperlinks to the Technorati search engine. You don't need to use Technorati for your tags, but I chose to do so because it's currently the most popular tag-based search engine.**

By using Technorati tags, you can encourage people who use that search engine to visit you. As an added bonus, if you register your blog with them they will generate a cool stats page for you. Like this.

Many CMS*** have tag makers, other don't. This blog, which runs off Drupal, does not. I make my tags with this tag-maker: Life In Bush's America tag Maker.

Just type in the keywords, then generate the HTML you need for the tags.

I've done my best to explain blog-taxonomy... it took me a long time to grok why it's so important and how to implement it into my blog posts. If you don't understand anything I've written, simply post a question and I'll do my best to elaborate for you.

Note: This was originally posted here.

* This could also be called "SEO", or, Search Engine Optimization. However, I'm only going to focus on why it's important to organize your blog well, and not other things you can do to make your site friendly to the search engines.

** There are other's like IceRocket, and certain CMS*** have their own tag systems.

*** CMS: Content Management System. A web-based application that allows you to create and post to a blog. Examples are Blogger, WordPress or Mambo. Brainshrub.com runs off the Drupal CMS.