How to Get Your Article Tagged
Tagging an article refers to attaching metadata tags to a certain article to increase its Internet exposure. Meta tags are keywords that help Internet search engines categorize your article. Search engines like Google or Yahoo use a special algorithm to "crawl" through each article on the Web and determine where it should appear in the search results. If you're writing an article about basketball, you should tag the word "basketball" to your article. When somebody searches for basketball in a search engine, your article will be included in those search results. This is called search engine optimization (SEO). There are only two ways to publish an article to the Web: manually or through a content management system (CMS). Your publishing method will determine how you will tag your article.
Other People Are Reading
Instructions
-
Tagging an Article Through a Content Management System
-
1
Type your article in the text box of your CMS. A CMS is a platform that makes publishing to the Web simple. Some popular CMS's are WordPress, Blogger, Drupal and Movable Type. The CMS will compute all the computer programming codes needed to publish an article and users will only have to worry about pressing the "publish" button.
-
2
Locate the "Tags" section of your CMS. Each CMS may call it something different. For example, WordPress has a section that says "Add Tags," while Demand Studios calls it "Key Concepts." The tags section will have text-input fields where you can type in your tag.
-
-
3
Type your tags into the input fields. Your tags are keywords that describe your article. For example, if you wrote an article about the 2011 NBA Championship, your keywords would be: NBA, basketball, championship, Dallas Mavericks, Miami Heat, LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Dirk Nowitzki, 2011 and finals. These are all terms users may enter into a search to look for articles about the NBA Championship. Make sure to follow the tagging rules of your specific CMS. Some platforms will only allow a certain number of tags per article, while some platforms will limit how many words you can use in each tag. It is important to follow these rules because search engines penalize publishers who try to "game" the system (for example, add 1,000 tags to each article or add tags that don't have to do with the article).
-
4
Publish your article to the Web. This will consist of pressing a button that says "Publish."
Tagging an Article Manually
-
5
Open the source code for your article. If you plan to publish your article manually, you will have write your article in HTML code in a text editor (such as Microsoft Notepad), save it as a Web file, and publish it to the Web via a file transfer protocol. The source code is the text document with your HTML code. Inexperienced computer programmers should stick to using a CMS.
-
6
Locate the HTML code that starts the header of your article. This code is labeled <head>. The header of your website ends with a closing header tag. The closing header tag is labeled </head>. You will have to add your article tags in between the opening and close of the header.
-
7
Position your text cursor between the header tags and type "<meta name" (no quotes) followed by an equal sign.
Here is an example:
<head>
<meta name=
</head>
This tells the Internet browser we would like to add some type of meta data to our article. Meta data allows us to specify several different elements of our document (for example, page description, keywords, author and last modified) and will not be displayed on the page. Only the search engine's "crawler" will see the data.
-
8
Enter the category of data you would like to specify. Since we want to tag our article, we want to specify the keywords of the article. In order to tell the Internet browser we are specifying the article's keywords, type the word "keywords" (in quotes) after the equal sign.
Here's an example:
<head>
<meta name="keywords"
</head>
This tells the browser we want to specify the article's keywords. Now we just have to add the keywords.
-
9
Press the space bar to skip a space and type the word "content" (no quotes) followed by an equal sign.
Here's an example:
<head>
<meta name="keywords" content=
</head>
-
10
Open a set of quotation marks and type in your keywords separated by commas. Close the quotation marks once you've finished, and close the entire tag by typing a backslash followed by a closed carrot.
<head>
<meta name="keywords" content="NBA,Miami Heat,Dallas Mavericks,2011,LeBron James,finals,championship"/>
</head>
You can add a space between the comma and the next word if you want to, but most search engine crawlers will only crawl a certain number of characters. A good rule of thumb is to keep your content under 60 characters.
-
11
Save your document and publish it once you're done editing it.
-
1
Tips & Warnings
When entering keywords, type your keywords the same way somebody would search for it. It's best to keep all keywords lowercase unless they are proper nouns. Also avoid punctuation (such as hyphens or apostrophes) in your keywords.
When you can't think of good terms to use to tag your article, go to a search engine and search for a similar article. The words you use to search for the article are the words you should use to tag your article.
References
- Photo Credit Photos.com/Photos.com/Getty Images
