Tagging Your Blog: 2 Types of Tags and Choosing Your Poison

For Technosailor readers who have been reading for some time, you have no doubt watched the migration of this blog from categories to tags. In their most simplistic form, the two are identical. They slap labels on entries and make it easier to find information. However, there is a key difference in terms of structure and net effect. Categories embrace a tree-like structure that puts everything into its own file folder while tags tend to be more abstract and less easy to structure so simply.

I posted a comment this morning over on Darren’s blog about tagging his content. The comment was a follow-on of a Skype conversation I had with him late last year before the Christmas holiday. Let me expand on the thought here.

Tags, as described by Wikipedia are “pieces of information separate from, but related to, an object.” Wikipedia goes on to compare them to keywords. They are really pieces of metadata, or data about data; data describing data.

Tags are popular as social networking tools. You’ll see tags in use at Flickr, Del.icio.us and other places. In these contexts, readers assign their own tags to content.

There are two kinds of tagging to consider when implementing tags on your blog. Both have value but both have very different results. In fact, weigh your choice of tagging type very carefully before diving in and going crazy. How one tags and the kinds of tags they use has significant effects on the direction of a blog long term. They are powerful items that can make or break a site.

Consider the two major tagging types.

1. Spatial Tagging - Spatial tagging is geared toward gaining new readers. It uses external services like Technorati, Digg and other similar third-party services to find relevant content outside of your blog! By tagging in this way, blog readers can quickly find related content and likewise, your blog entry will gain more exposure to other blogs. The cons of spatial tagging is that your own content takes a back seat to other content.
2. Internal Tagging - I tried hard to come up with a catchy term for internal tagging, but I couldn’t think of one. In essence, internal tagging connects your own blog together. Like your life, your blog can be seen as a nebula of thoughts, opinions and topics that are rarely connected dot-to-dot but relate to each other in a much more amorphous way. This is the method of tagging used here at Technosailor. The benefit to internal tagging is that more of your own content is placed at the forefront of reader activity. Quickly, readers can access other related entries and gain more exposure to what your blog is all about. The downfall to this approcah is that you get much less world exposure and the net result is sacrificing potential new readers you might find if you used the spatial tagging approach

As you can see, tagging is a powerful tool. It can be considered dangerous in terms of long-term effect on a blog and the ramifications it can have. Think deeply and offer all consideration to both of these kinds of tagging before deciding what kinds of tags you want to use. In six months, it will be hard to reverse course easily.

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About the Author: Aaron Brazell is the lead editor of Technosailor.com and a social media expert. His passion is to see companies and individuals use the internet and web technologies wisely and effectively to promote their brands and companies. He is Business Development Manager for Lijit and he worked as Director of Technology at b5media from 2005-2008 and is currently an independent consultant.