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Do you want visitors on your WordPress blog? Sure! Me too. And it was a surprise when I found how big an effect using proper tags on posts has!
My nerdy alter ego has to jump from the curtains and rant a little bit. (Besides, it’s past noon and I’ve had my first cup of coffee as a tongue-twister…)
A blog starts to exhibit much more interesting side to it, once it gets readers and feedback. There used to be a “kind of a blogosphere” already back in the 1980s, but it was then called newsgroups. People wrote articles, asked questions, and made friends via pure textual communications.
Blogs rose to power in around 2000. Around there came the revolution of search engines and content management systems (CMS). CMS’s are programs like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla! and many others that help the media boss and article editors to keep things in order. A good CMS is a powerful tool, and it enables everyone to participate in content creation – in their own level of competence. WordPress is a good example of an enabling technology: without it, the world of blogs would be considerably harder to grasp and learn.
I hope you find the following tips useful in improving your blog. None of the tricks are difficult nor illegal, but they may be a bit addictive! 😉 Caveat emptor.
SEO or search engine optimization is an art of its own. I won’t go to that much. It would be very interesting topic, but it’s quite fast-paced and theoretical. SEO is the science behind creating optimal content so that Google and other engines would rank your blog in the top-most ranks, when a user does searches within your domain of writing.
Instead the tips that I have found very useful are: tags, commenting, and using the Tag Surfer.
I hadn’t paid attention to these small descriptive words – tags. I relied more on automatic search engine activity to get me readers. This was a wrong strategy. I do have to also mention that I hadn’t written much for a couple of weeks, so these tips are based more on a hunch than statistics.
Tag words can be added to a Post in the editing phase, or later on. My blog is about bipolar disorder and how to cope with it. So the tag cloud looks like: ‘Bipolar disorder’, ‘American Psychiatric Association’, ‘mental illness’, etc. These tags then appear in other WordPress users’ dashboard, when they use either the Tag surfer or Readomattic functions.
The magic is to use a set of consistent, logical tags – and not sprinkle them too much. It’s a natural tendency that new tags are introduced along the way, when you’re discovering new subjects. That’s ok. But try not to spread your vocabulary into thousands of tags. I’m not sure, but I think that it starts to look like link farm to the search engines and readers: in other words, frustrating. Using a lot of aliases is like harvesting with a large machine, but yes.. some people probably are annoyed and confused if the tag cloud is several hundreds of words in size.
Readomattic is WordPress’ equivalent of a feed reader (just like Google Reader). It enables the blog owner to surf feeds and tags – discovering interesting blog posts. Actually I don’t know what’s the fundamental difference between Tag surfer and Readomattic… Do you?
As always, I’m thrilled to receive feedback!
Bipolar manx - The life of 