Building Search Engine Tag Trails - Example one: The car site
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In this example you own a small site where classic car fans can share their interests. Your first instinct will be to use the following tags: Car, classic cars, Historic cars, auto, older cars, automobile, drive, etc, as your tags. Now don't get me wrong; for the most part, these are a good start to your tagging arsenal. The problem is that while they will make your site show up for a lot of generic car- related searches, you have a lot of competition for the top spot.
So let's take a look at some of the trails that you could build, in relevant sections of your site. The goal is to get your site to show up more often and in smaller results pools as well as the big ones.
Car(s): You could trail down into different brands of cars that are frequently talked about on the site as well as specific models of cars, so, consider "Ford" and "Ford mustang" as possible tags.
Historic or classic car(s): You can use sub-categories like "classic car repair," "historic car parts," or "classic car restoration." These and others are all options open to you for tagging.
Drive: This one opens up phrases like "classic car drive" and "driving a historic car" to your site.
Example Two: The food blog
In this case your site is a blog about foods. In a blog you have a great many more chances to tag your site because each posting can be given any number of tags and you can add new tags every day that you post -- even multiple times a day if you post that often. Here your list of obvious tags might be include food cooking, healthy, food shopping, groceries, etc. So lets look at some ways that you might be able to expand on your tags.
Food: Here you can break it down into types of food like "fruits" or "vegetables" as well as specific foods like "steaks," "asparagus" or "peas."
Cooking: Here you can use phrases such as "healthy cooking" or "easy meals" or even "southern cooking" to expand on your tag library.
Groceries: This one is a bit more challenging but you can use phrases like "getting groceries," "fresh produce" or "organic groceries."
By now you are no doubt getting the idea of what you should be doing to make your tag trails work productively, but just in case you aren't, here are some of the basic guidelines.
- Keep it on target. It will do you no good to have words that make no sense or are very peripheral on your site. This cannot be stressed enough; your tags should be on target and relevant to your site.
- Don't be too repetitive. "Cars" and "classic cars" are one thing, but "cars," "car" and "classic cars," "car driving," "car fans" and "car enthusiasts" is taking it too far.
- Don't use convoluted tags that no one in their right mind would search for. No one looks for "how to repair vintage leather on my model-T car," at least no one in their right mind, so don't bother with these long phrases unless they are specific to a brand or extremely well known.
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