Tags Show What Visitors Like

If you are a blogger, know that post tags could be your best friend when it comes to identifying what your readers want more of. Some of you may initially be thinking that is what tag clouds do, but it’s not. Tag clouds show what the blogger likes, not what the readers like. Having a tag cloud, in my book, is like asking someone to pick a card out of a deck that is manipulated to force a known pick.

Having a list of tags that do not indicate popularity by size or order, offer insight to what your readers really want to see more of. On this site it  appears that you want to see more usability tips, web design tips, and Google. The tags have spoken.

Related, Categories, and Post Tags

If you take the time to look underneath this post you will find my blue gray box designed to keep my visitors a little longer.

On top I have a new feature I am very proud of, the Just Posted link. It displays my latest blog post throughout the site. The next is the Related Posts. Using related posts on a blog is a well known feature to keep the visitors a little longer. I used to limit this to just five, but noticed it worked better when I increased the list to ten. This feature sometimes turns into popular posts if I do not have any posts related.

The next part of this is my Category, and my Post Tags links. Using Google Analytics I found gold pouring out from the tag pages. If you have tags displayed on your blog and use Google Analytics, just look up your content and filter for “/tags/”.

I also looked for popular category pages as well, but they just didn’t seem to be as revealing. They were clicked less, and page views after didn’t engage the visitor as much. Post tags however, were very revealing, and it was no shocker that visitors to my website wanted more usability and web design tips. They were not clicking those tags because the words were huge like in a tag cloud. They were clicking them because they wanted more on that topic.

How to Display Tags Using WordPress

If you are not already displaying post tags on your WordPress blog, here is how. First you will need to make sure you are actually submitting the important tags for the post after writing your post. This is found under the heading Post Tags right underneath your category tags in the right column.

The code to insert in your single.php file (your post display page on WordPress) is as follows: <?php the_tags( $before, $separator, $after ); ?>. I personally use: <?php the_tags(”, ‘, ‘, ”); ?> for this blog.

If you are not displaying them now give it a try, and if you already are check out your new resource of killer content ideas.