Rich,
I’ve been told that I need to tag my blog posts, the videos I put up to YouTube and my Flickr photos. What exactly does that mean?
–Tagging in Topsham
Dear Tagging,
Tagging is a way of organizing and/or classifying information on the Internet. Sometimes it’s done by just one person (the content creator), and other times it can be done by a community (social tagging.)
Imagine that for every piece of content you upload you could attach little yellow stickies that help classify that content. A video of a day at the beach might be tagged, “beach”, “maine”, “children”, “ocean”, “mutant seal attack”, or anything else that would help properly identify that video for others.
On a blog, tagging a post is a lot like assigning categories. Blog categories help define the overreaching themes of the blog. On the flyte blog we have categories like, “analytics“, “entrepreneur and small business“, and “social media” where we place our individual posts. On your blog it should be categories that describe what you write about.
Tags perform a similar role, except that they are specific to the post. If I were to write a post about Barack Obama’s use of social media I might tag it “barack obama” but I wouldn’t add a category called “Barack Obama” unless I planned on writing about our 44th president on a regular basis.
Photo by J_O_I_D
