Tips on Tagging

I've recently built a few blogs for friends and clients which I've setup with tag clouds. I've been asked serveral times for some recommendations on how to use tags when blogging, so here's a quick post with what I think are some best practices.

• Keep your tags short and simple. "Football" is a good tag for a sports blog. "The Chicago Bears are going to be great this year despite Rex Grossman's inconsistencies" is not a good tag.
• Limit the number of tags you use. Having a cloud of 700 tags probably isn't a good idea unless you're running a massive multi-faceted site.
• Keep your tags consistent and re-use them. Don't use "TV" on one post and "television" on another. Re-using your tags allows them to grow and be weighted higher
• Keep tags relevant to the content of your blog. I make a Rex Grossman reference above but I'm not going to tag this post with "football" or "Chicago Bears" because that wouldn't make sense to an audience of web developers.

Remember that your tag cloud is a navigation element. Having a massive tag cloud where every tag links to a single post isn't very useful to your users. On Code Scene I have about 25 tags that I consistently re-use so my tag cloud becomes an easy way to find all my posts on CSS, Movable Type, or some other topic. The number one rule for tagging blog posts is to keep it simple.