If you want to make money online, you’ve probably started a blog. A blog is the easiest, most tried and true way of making money online. I personally have chosen not to monetize this site yet, but starting a blog is your best shot of starting off broke today and making money online tomorrow. Blogs get traffic, and the more you write, the better you do. Making money online is a tough grind at the beginning. You need to work hard, and line up your “ducks” properly. This might mean making 100 or 200 YouTube videos. Etsy sellers post hundreds of designs. In my case, it’s meant writing a whole bunch of articles. A big part of making sure your efforts are successful is knowing the “mechanics” of what you’re doing, and understanding why any given activity will help your online business grow. Tagging your posts is an important activity for your business’ growth.
Blogs rely on Google, and Google brings in the most internet traffic
I’ve shown my work on this subject in other articles. The main reason people fail to leverage Google is it takes quite a while to rank. If you take the time required to write a lot of articles, you will have a complete website. Complete websites tend to show up on Google. As a matter of fact, they tend to show up on Google years later. It’s all about producing enough content to get on the map.
Enter tags
If you’re blogging, you want to set up your site using WordPress. WordPress is the main platform for bloggers, and it’s this way for a reason. If you must begin with a free platform, user Blogger, or any platform that allows you to export to WordPress. Check this before starting your blog. It’ll save you a lot of time and money.
Once you’re on WordPress, you want to be tagging your posts. Every post you write should have a few tags attached. These tags can be mental associations. If you wrote a post about podcasting, you could write “make money online” as a tag. Tags can also be descriptive. That same podcast could be tagging “art” or “podcasting” or “radio”. Anything that can be connected to your post is a potential tag.
What was the original point of tags?
Tags are kind of everywhere, but we kind of ignore them. According to wikipedia, they were meant to be labels assigned to content so that the content would be easily searchable. This made a lot of sense before the modern forms of social media popularized posting. Most people were finding things solely via search engines. Tags have morphed a lot in recent years. We’re blessed to have hashtags nowadays. The average user is familiar with these and uses them to search for trends and ideas on social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter.
Tags create a separate feed, which can be seen by search engines and users in turn
Creating a tag is kind of like choosing a category for your blog post, except that tags are more about word association while categories are designed to organize your site into different sections. People can follow your tags, in theory. If you have a lot of good or entertaining information, you might find that people make backlinks to your tags. This allows people to share a bunch of their favorite posts by you with others. Each tag page is indexed by Google and offers the opportunity to get more organic traffic than if you had simply posted.
Tags work on other blogging platforms
You don’t feel the SEO effects of your work because the tag’s feed is owned by Instagram, Twitter, or whatever website we’re using. But hashtags do still bring in traffic. This traffic is internal to the social network. Social network hashtags do bring in SEO traffic, but that traffic is distributed evenly across the people posting on the network. It doesn’t help anyone besides them.
How do I add tags to my WordPress site?
You add your tags within the WordPress editor, on each individual post. When two posts have the same tag, they get added to the same feed. You can find tags in the settings tab in the top right corner of your WordPress editor (as of 2024).
Within the Settings tab, you’re going to look for the “Post” section, and scroll all the way down. You should find a section called tags.
You add your tags in the text box that says, “Add New Tag”. Your tag can be multiple words long. Type what you want to, and press enter. You can put as many tags into the box as you want. If you do this on multiple posts you should be able to reap the benefits.
The tag cloud page
Displaying a tag cloud can help your SEO in the short run. This is a section of the website which allows the user to click on specific tag names, filtering by post. You can display a tag cloud using the WordPress editor. Instructions on how to get this done can be found using this link.
Is it possible to use too many tags?
Yes, you can absolutely use too many tags. If you have a website that’s full of tags, it can bloat your site, and make it look like your site has a lot of pointless pages. This can appear spammy or gimmicky to Google and might hurt your ranking. You want to tag your posts, but once you have more than 100 posts live, you’re going to want to look into limiting the number of tags being shown online. I do this by only writing about 5 tags per post. This means that by the time I get to 200 posts, I’ll have 1,000 tags live maximum.
When I get above 200 posts, I’ll change my tagging settings to make my tags invisible to search engines. 200 live webpages on the internet is a lot. I’ll use Yoast SEO (can be found through the link in paragraph about tag clouds) to make my tags invisible.
There are a lot of nuances to blogging and making money online. But adding tags to your posts are an easy way to put money in your pocket by way of extra traffic. If you can give yourself an advantage in making money online, you should. Labelling your posts with tags takes an extra three to thirty seconds per post. Just employ a bit of discipline and add your tags. When you get to having a lot of posts live, you’ll find yourself ahead of the game, SEO wise. Just install the Yoast SEO plugin when you have a big site.
Thanks for paying attention.
