Tagging - blog posts and beyond

This is the next installment of the "How to Setup Your Blog" series. It's about creating threads and themes throughout your blog.

Tagging is a way to help something be found. This is true of the items in your shops, and it is also true of the posts on your blog.

With the recent SEO discussions, you probably know that tagging your items help search engines find them. Also, if members of the Blogfire guild tag their shop items with "blogfire", we can all easily search to find each other's items (for spotlights, promotions, etc). Similarly, if you tag your blog posts, visitors will be able to easily access posts along a theme of interest and stay to read more.

Adding Tags or Labels

When writing a new post, there is a space below to add labels, which are the same thing as tags. For example, this post is tagged "blog setup series". Once finished reading this entry, should a reader want to read the other installments, they simply click that label. Or in the featured member series, to see other guild members, readers simply click the "guild members" label. There is no need to add links to multiple posts in a series into every post.

Also, let's say you're blogging about your polymer clay creations. If you tag the post with "polymer clay", and have tagged similar posts in that manner, someone will be able to follow that post to all of your posts on polymer clay, maybe eventually running across some items they like.

Sidebar Tag Clouds

Once you have a number of tags or labels and want to attract people to click on the series, you can add a tag/label cloud to your blog.

Blogger already has a gadget that will add a Labels list to your sidebar. Simply choose it from the list after choosing "Add a gadget" from the dashboard.

But if you want to add a cloud (like we have on the bottom right sidebar), you can obtain the code from a third party and edit the HTML of the blog's template.

1. Add the Label gadget


2. Follow the directions at Compender
   


3. Save and rearrange as desired from the dashboard

For other platforms, there are many third party HTML codes that can be used to generate tag clouds based on keywords in posts. To find them, Google is your friend!

Use what works for you - create your own label system for your posts and use the display widget that is best for your blog.