I'd be interested to learn your views on tags, as people seem to have very differrent ways of using them. I am a librarian by profession, and I also write book and journal indexes, so I am used to being very precise when assigning words and terms as index or catalogue entries. The thinking is that if somebody finds an entry for "forks", and follows it up because they are interested in table cutlery, they won't be best pleased to find stuff on gardening tools. The indexer would therefore probably write entries for "forks, table" and "forks, garden", to clear up any misunderstandings.
But does this work in the world of Google and Hubpages? Are broad terms more useful than narrow ones, because they will attract more hits, even though they may be what we librarians used to call "false drops"? Is it fair to Web searchers to add tags that may mislead them?
What is your policy when writing a hub? What is the average number of tags that you use? Do you favour single word tags or two-word terms, or short phrases? What is your balance between precise and broad terms?
I start with a top level flag as per the list given when you create a hub - these tend to appear on the topic page and are pretty broad: business, travel, entertainment I also usually add "how to" and / or "advice" which fit almost any hub - too general for my taste except I figured they create the question someone may ask i.e advice for first timer in Italy or how to operate locks on canals
For Flagship hubs the requirements is : 15 relevant tags, including 2-3 common misspellings or spelling variants (if any). I make sure I include both US / UK of common spellings.
I tend to use short phrases too: property investment, investing abroad, overseas investment all on the same hub - but I have no idea whether its a good idea !
The tags are like keywords, that is, you are trying to guess what the person looking for your page is likely to type into a search engine.
They don't tend to type commas at all!
And they won't usually think heirarchically, so they won't usually type "forks garden".
What they WILL do is type "garden forks".
Remember to include the singular and plural forms as well as misspellings and international spellings.
I usually choose a few general terms (though these can be annoying in terms of ads - I keep getting ads for things like "women in wet t-shirts" on my hubs about women's issues, which are annoying in some and virtually the anti-thesis of what I'm trying to promote in others), a few variations on specific terms, and a few longer phrases or questions that I might type into a search engine if I were looking for the info I've written about in my hub, for a total of about 20 tags. When I start getting keyword information from Analytics, I might go back and add or revise a few tags based on what other people are using to find my page. There are also SEO tools you can use to suggest alternatives, like this one: http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/ … /index.php
So on my recent Richard III hub, for example, I have:
education
history
richard york
richard of gloucester
king richard the third
the princes in the tower
did richard murder the princes in the tower
etc.
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