Tag Archives: tags

Does tagging content make it easier to find with search? No.

I’ve received this question from several people now. Below are two videos from Matt Cutts who works on Google’s Webspam team explaining how tagging content mostly does not affect their search results. This also means that tagging largely will not affect how results appear on Middlebury’s site, since we use Google to provide our search results.

Tags

Tag Clouds

This does not mean that you shouldn’t tag content at all. Tags can still be useful for humans who want to find other posts and pages on a topic. However, if you want your page to be easier to find, your time is better invested in making sure that the content is well written, structured and relevant to a particular topic.

Categories and Tags

Blog categories and tags: what they mean and when to use them

Categories = Audience

Tags = Description

LIS Website Team confession: As a team we’ve struggled with a way to articulate to everyone how and why we structured the categories on this blog in the way that we did, and how we intend categories and tags to be used. Hopefully this explanation will provide a useful distinction between the two, and give both post authors and blog readers guidance for how to use them.

Categories (Select your audience)

Use a category to reach an audience (or several).

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The One and Only – All Things LIS Blog

Voted yes on the one-blog readiness; will discuss how to launch at our next meeting.
Current categories listed below. Any change before we move ahead?

External Audience – term used TBD by vote by Fri 9/18 at 5 pm

Areas and Workgroups – use name of area as the category and use functions of the work area as tags (audience is mostly internal)

* Academic Consulting Services – research support, instruction, liaison
* Collection Management – aquire, catalog, preserve, maintain resources
* Enterprise Technology & Infrastructure – programming, systems, reporting, network
* LIS Administration – budget, planing, policy, assessment, strategy
* User Services – technology help and support, borrowing and lending, computing support, computing labs, media and event support

Institutions
* Middlebury
* MIIS
* Language Schools
* Schools Abroad
* Bread Loaf School of English
* Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
* MMLA

Teams
* Area Directors
* Curricular Technology
* Digitization
* LIS Website