Add Search Tags to Your Posts for Greater Visibility, Stickiness and More Traffic

Before I begin I want to say that this technique should work for any blog platform including Blogger and Wordpress users.

After upgrading my blog template I stopped using my Search Tags because New Blogger already comes with a labels/categories functionality built in (just like Wordpress does). That decision seemed logical at the time because the label/categories were also being indexed well enough by Technorati.

However, I’ve reconsidered that decision and so I’m reintroducing my Search Tags. Why? One reason is because I don’t want to clutter up my labels/categories with too many of them. I want to keep them as general as possible, and then I will use my Search Tags for the more obscure sub-categories that I might want to use for specific posts.

The main benefit to your readers is that they will be able to drill-down deeper into your work and find more information. You can also use it to add relevant keywords to your posts for the SERPS (search engine results pages), and it will get your posts indexed deeper into Technorati as well.

Ultimately it will give your blog greater visibility, bring in more traffic, as well as make your blog more sticky for visitors to hang around longer. The longer that your visitors hang around, the chances are they will subscribe to your newsfeed, come back again as repeat readers and develop a community.

And that folks is the name of the game, so let me show you how to do it. First all you should read my previous posts explaining how the code works. Please read the follow tutorials:

• Convert Technorati Tags to Blog Search Links: Part 1
• Convert Technorati Tags to Blog Search Links: Part II

Ok, assuming that you know what you are doing now you will need to put the tag into the bottom of your posts. The best way that I know how to do that is with Windows Live Writer. One of the things that I like about Live Writer is that it comes with a function for generating standard tags such as Technorati and Del.icio.us.

But the best part is it has a custom tag generator, so I created my own custom tag and this is the code that I use:

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tags/{tag-encoded}” mce_href=”http://technorati.com/tags/{tag-encoded}” rel=”tag”></a><a href=”http://search.<a href="http://www.blogbloke.com/tag/blogger/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" class="st_tag internal_tag" rel="tag nofollow" title="Posts tagged with Blogger">blogger</a>.com/?as_q={tag-encoded}&ie=UTF-8&ui=blg&bl_url=blog.instabloke.com&x=40&y=10″ mce_href=”http://search.<a href="http://www.blogbloke.com/tag/blogger/" class="st_tag internal_tag" rel="tag nofollow" title="Posts tagged with Blogger">blogger</a>.com/?as_q={tag-encoded}&ie=UTF-8&ui=blg&bl_url=blog.instabloke.com&x=40&y=10″>{tag}</a>