Short Course on Tags, Categories, and SEOs

by:  Staci Stallings

As I’ve been doing a few courses on social media and online marketing, one question has come up that I think deserves a short course for those who want to take their marketing to the next level as simply as possible.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the term “keywords,” and you probably know what it means–words and phrases that will be used in a search to find your content.

So, Suzy Jo wants to find something new to read.  She goes to, let’s say Google, and in the search box, she types “Christian fiction.”

Christian fiction is the KEYWORD that Suzy Jo is using to search for what she wants to read.  Why is this significant?  Because if your content falls under “Christian fiction,” then you definitely want to have your information optimized so that your content comes up in the first page (or so) when Suzy Jo searches for it.  Otherwise, Suzy Jo will have to know of you personally to be able to find your content.

Therefore, the first thing you want to do is to come up with some keywords for your content:

Christian fiction

Books

Faith

Romance

Those are some of mine.

Now you want to “optimize” your content so that when Suzy Jo searches, your information will come up very close to the top.

If you are working in WordPress (in others too, but I’m most familiar with WP), there are several ways to optimize your keywords to give your information a better chance of rising to the top of a search.  Three things to look at to optimize:

1) Categories

2) Tags

3) Search Engine Optimization plug-ins

Categories

To the right side of your posting panel in WP, you have a column that starts with Publish, then options of when to publish, then Page Attributes.

Under Page Attributes, you have the option of setting up Categories.  These are general, broad topics that your blog contains.  Some of my categories include:

Motivation

Parenting

Faith

God

Christian

Christian books

Tags

Tags are more specific to the blog posts.  Think in terms of keywords that someone might type in to search for a blog about your topic.  So for me:

relationships, Christian, Christianity, Trinity, faith, hope

Combining Keywords, Categories and Tags

The idea is to get as many of your keywords on a post multiple times.  No one is quite sure of the algorithms the search engines use, but one thing is clear — the more times a certain keyword appears in your post, the more likely that post will rank highly on a search.

So for example, let’s say that your post is about motorcycle crashes.

“Motorcycle Crashes”  might be your title (that’s 1)

Your post might read:

Motorcycles are often considered the preferred mode of transportation for those free-spirited among us.  But the truth is motorcycle crashes kill more Americans than…

Incidents of “Motorcycle” appearing:  3

Incidents of “Motorcycle crashes” appearing 2

Now we add our category:  Motorcycles

And we add our tags:  motorcycles, motorcycle crashes, motorcycle, crashes

Do you see how we have now increased our chances of being found simply by using our keywords?

Great!

Now you can take this a step further by installing something like the “All in One SEO” pack (available for WP self-hosted blogs).  With this plug-in, you can add a second instance of your title, a short description (using your keywords) and a second set of tags!

Each place you can legitimately add your keyword, the better.

A Note for Authors

All of this is important on your blog posts, but it becomes CRITICAL in your book buy pages.  To find out more about how to do this, please visit my friend, Terri Main’s short course at: http://wordmasterbooks.businesscatalyst.com/amazon.html

God bless & happy marketing!