As an SEO experiment, I started tagging (in addition to the categories at left) my blog posts about, I don’t know, 15 months ago. It’s impossible to measure precisely, but I don’t think it’s had a significant effect. Last month tag-based pages only got 823 page views, and a mere 123 visitors came from Technorati. There may be unknown ancillary SEO benefits to tagging, but now I just enjoy inventing peculiar descriptors for my posts (see, for example, .
Thanks to Ultimate Tag Warrior, here’s a quick tag cloud of the 200 most popular tags on this site. Keep in mind that this only reflects, maybe, one-eighth of all the posts on this site. There’s no frickin’ way I’m going back and manually tagging the other 4000-odd posts.
I’ve tried to be disciplined about not tagging entries with the same terms as I categorize them, but clearly I sometimes fail. I guess what happens is that I start writing about something, tagging each entry. Eventually I decide that it merits its own category, so I upgrade it. I might go back and remove the tags for malta, gozo, vancouver, travel, video, morocco and marketing to make the thing more useful.
Hi Darren. How are you settling back in Canada? You were away for a good year. — Are you living in Vancouver, or elsewhere?