How to make a list of great tags without fancy software

While I do indeed use some software to come up with my tag ideas sometimes I have developed an excellent way of creating a great list of tags for each HubPage I write without spending a dime and I'd like to teach it to you here. Please use this method to your advantage and please do not abuse it by noting what follows in the next two paragraphs about their importance in search engine results and tag relevancy.

Tags are very important for appearing in search engine results

A tag is a keyword that you chose to be associated with your HubPage or blog post. The technical term is "meta tag". Basically, what happens is the search engines such as Google and Yahoo! come along and spider your article. The search engines don't just spider your article's title, H1 to H4 heading text and paragraphs, but also your article's tags. So, when somebody does a search in Google and keys in one of your tags there's a strong chance that your article will come up in the search. So, tags are very important to coming up in the search engine results.

The importance of relevancy in your tags

When you chose your tags you must make sure that they are relevant to the content of your HubPage or blog post. If you are writing about subject A, for example, and you include a tag such as a famous singers' name that you think will get you lots of traffic you'll do two things: 1) Make the Internet user feel frustrated and hit the back button on her/his browser and 2) Possibly get the 'ol Google slap. That's right - kicked off of Google. You see, Big G places a huge emphasis on relevancy. Not only do does your article's content have to be relevant to its title, but so do the tags.

Now the Nitty-Gritty: How to come up with a list of great tags without spending any money

The first thing you need to do is come up with three to five tags yourself. This should be easy. Which keywords would you type into Google, Yahoo! or Bing (MSN) to find your HubPage of website? Make sure these three to find keywords are not too related. By this I mean don't use almost exact synonyms. For example, if your Hub is a review of a specific model of an electronics gadget don't just write three variations of that gadget's model number. That won't help. Try to think of a short broad list of terms.

Let the search engines tell you what tags to put in your HubPages or blog posts

Now, here's what you have to do. Open up your Google in your browser. Type in your first tag idea but don't search it. Just type it in and take your hands off the keyboard. You'll see a whole list of keywords come up. Of those keywords write down the ones that are the most relavant to your article. DO NOT include any keywords that don't pertain to your article as this will hurt you (mentioned above). Repeat this process in Google's search bar with your other
"starter" tag keyword ideas. Continue to build your list with Google's suggestions. By now you should have about 15-20 tag ideas. I bet Google will make some suggestions that you never thought of!

My BONUS TIP for coming up with a list of good tags

Now what I want you to do is repeat this process using 1) eBay, 2) Yahoo!) 3) Amazon and 4) YouTube. Open up the search bars to all three of these websites and enter your initial broad tag keyword ideas. Repeat the process excatly as you did in Google. You'll start to see some patterns. Some of the tag keywords that kept coming up in Google will also come up in these websites. These are the most searched keywords for your content and these need to be your tags. It's possible that you'll find some more tag ideas in eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon and YouTube that you didn't find in Google. Just make your list.

One last suggestion about tagging your HubPage or blog post

Each time you publish a HubPage you must have tags. If you have too few tags HubPages will remind you and if you have too many tags HubPages will remind you. This is called "over-tagging" and is considered a form of spaming. I've found that generally about 20 tags per HubPage or blog post gets me the best results. Again, it's absolutely essential that your tags be relavant to your article's content.

Please let me know if this HubPage about tags was helpful comments section and give thumbs up. Good luck with your online marketing endeavors!

Cheers!
-Dawei888 :-)