What are Tags?
Originally tags were a way
to group links to blog
postings (or in the case of
Hubpages hubs) that are
topically related. Many
folks have come to the
conclusion that adding a
lot of tags can help your
search engine traffic, so are
suggesting adding a ton of
tags.
But, tags aren't magic for
traffic for your Hubpages.
There's a reason they work
well. Here's a few
observations on some pros
and cons on tags for
Hubpages. Most of this
works for blogs like
Wordpress as well, as the
process of creating tags
works in a similar way
there.
How Many Tags Do You
Typically Have On a Hub?
How Many Tags Do You
Shoot For?
Less than 5
5-10
10-20
20-30
More than 30
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Ranking Well in the
Google SERPs
First, lets take a look at the
keys for generating good
rankings on Google. Here is
the grossly oversimplified
version of success in Google
rankings. This isn't a course
on ranking, but just
enough information to
understand why tags are
important. What we don't
cover here is the choice of
keywords. It's obvious that
if you choose to optimize
for a keyword that no one
is searching for, then it
really doesn't matter how
well you are optimized.
On page factors (things
that you can do on the
hub itself) - The title field
is far and away the biggest
factor. Heading fields are a
distant second, and the
density of the keywords
you want to rank for is
another small factor (years
ago this was the major
factor, which is why
keyword stuffing used to
be so popular)
Off page factors (things
you do with the linking to
the hub) - Considered by
some to be 80% of a pages
ability to rank, it comes
down to links, basically the
number of links and the
anchor text in those links.
It's important to note that
the links can come from
the same site as the page
being linked to, such as
Hubpages. The Page Rank
of a site is Google's
estimate of the importance
of a site, and is a weighting
factor in how much a link
is worth to the receiving
page. The most important
thing you can do for any
page to rank is to get lots
of links with the anchor
text that includes the terms
you want to rank for.
Generally, pages with more
backlinks will rank better
than pages with fewer
backlinks. And the anchor
text will help determine
what the pages ranks for
(the anchor text is the
words typically in blue that
are the text associated with
the link to the page.)
Since in Hubpages the title
of the hub is used both as
the title of the hub and as
the anchor text for all the
automatically generated
links, you can see that
choosing the keyword
carefully for your title will
have a huge impact on the
terms a hub will rank for.
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What Does Adding Tags
Do?
First - the obvious, it adds
the text of the tag to your
Hub. But while that can
help, it is secondary to the
other things that go on
when you add tags.
Tag Pages - More
importantly, tags are simply
links to pages that are
created with the tag as the
header or title of the page.
Click through to the tags
on your hubs and you will
find that you are on
another page that lists all
the hubs that have that tag
on them. But, (and this is a
big but) on Hubpages the
tag pages only have 10
hubs listed on them (with
links back to that hub).
SOOO, if 10 or fewer hubs
have that tag on them
then you have a link back
to your Hub from that tag
page. Your hub now has a
backlink, or some more
Google love.
So, you have the possibility
for every tag you add to
get a backlink to your hub.
That's the good news. So,
why not add hundreds of
tags? It turns out that
there's limit to how
effective this can be (not to
mention that hubpages
limits the number of tags,
but as usual they are
protecting you from doing
something stupid.)
On one hand you could
have a very popular tag. A
tag like "how to" has
almost 20000 hubs under
it. But, for reasons related
to how they manage the
links, only about the top 10
to 40 "hot" hubs are on tag
pages that will stick in the
Google index and have any
Page Rank. So, if you aren't
in the top 20, you won't
get much from it. Being on
the 31st page of "how to"
hubs does almost nothing
for your rankings.
On the flip side, a tag like
"dj+comet+01-46" only has
1 hub on it as of this
writing. That tag page will
likely not stay indexed and
will have little Page Rank
to link back to your hub.
Overall, you're better off
finding tags that have at
least 3 or 4 hubs linking to
them.
If you had dozens of tag
links on your hub, the Page
Rank that gets distributed
to each one will be so
diluted that you would
have no hope of getting
those tag pages to get and
stay indexed with Google.
And if you are writing a
hub to get some link juice
to an external page then
adding dozens of links
diluted the Page Rank that
you are going to pass to
the external link. So adding
a huge number of tags will
be self defeating as well.
Overall, you're better off
finding tags that have at
least 3 or 4 hubs linking to
them, 10 to 20 is probably
the sweet spot.
How Many Tags Should I
Add to a Hub?
So, is adding a bunch of
tags to your hub a good
way to improve traffic to
your hub? The answer is
probably. Like anything, it
depends on the
competition and the
number of similar hubs,
and whether your goal is to
do linking to pages off site.
Adding more tags can
generate internal backlinks
to your hub, but adding
too many dilutes the Page
Rank of the site and may
generate a bunch of tag
pages that will not stick in
the Google index and do
no one any good. Choose
tags that are a little
popular to improve your
odds of being on the first
page, and add at least a
dozen or so. Hubpages
limits the number of tags
that you can add,
apparently based in part
on the length of the hub,
so they've made it difficult
to add too many.Finally,
for those of you with
Wordpress blogs, it turns
out this can be even more
powerful on Wordpress as
it can be used to create
related article links right on
the page, but that's a Hub
for another day.
One other potential
benefit are the links from
related hubs. While
Hubpages doesn't really
disclose how they choose
which hubs link to which
other hubs on the related
hubs section, it seems they
use some combination of
the hub category and the
hub tags to choose related
hubs, with a bias towards a
few of your own hubs if
appropriate. Another
source of related links!
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