Increase blog traffic with tag optimization

If you blog you’re probably also tagging your posts. But have you ever considered optimizing your tagging to use the tags which brings in the most traffic?

Tag optimization isn’t much different from search engine optimization. Both are to let others know what your page or post is about. The core element is then to pick the best keywords / tags - the ones which brings in the most relevant traffic.

By following these simple steps based on tagging for technorati you’ll be able to increase the traffic being sent to your blog. The steps are a simple rutine of research > test > meassure > optimize.

Research

Look up related tags
When you’ve picked a tag as you’d usually do then check it on technorati to get related tags. Just simple search for the tag ‘in tags’ on technorati. E.g. check the tag ‘tagging’ and you’ll see that below the post count it says ‘Related tags for tagging’. Some of the tags suggested in relation to ‘tagging’ are ‘Tags’, ‘Blogging’, ‘Technorati’, ‘Del.icio.us’ and ‘Web2.0′ so write down the ones related to your post. For better results redo this with your new tags to create a larger list of potential tags.

Test

Look up tag usage
What we want to do is figure out which tags are most common and therefore most likely to bring traffic. This is done be checking tehnorati’s charts for tags e.g. the chart for ‘tagging’. Look up the chart for each tag on the list you just made and write down what seems to be the average daily tag amount.

Pick the most common tags and post
Now pick your desired amount of tags from the list and pick them by which tags has the highest daily average. Tag your blog post with those tags and publish.

Meassure

Check which tags gave traffic
Hopefully you’re using some kind of statistics tracking on your blog like google analytics etc. If you don’t have stats on your traffic - and even more important - stats on the referrers then it’s about time to get it.

What you should do with your stats is to check the referrers and see how many visitors technorati brought and from which tags. Then update your list of potential tags with which gave traffic, and which didn’t.

Optimize

Use the best tags on future posts
Next time you’re going to publish a blog post you should check your list of potential tags. Pick those which are relevant and gave traffic. And to get additional tags start with the first step ‘research’ and go through the entire process once again.

In time you’ll have a good list of relevant and traffic bringing tags. But even after your list is good enough it’s still best to check for additional tags once in a while.