…and so, the journey through the tips continues!
- Breaking under pressure.
April and May were undoubtedly me at my worst – all the commitments I had kept crashing down on me and yet I still spent hours trying to figure out the perfect comment or get posts done…it got to the point where my nervousness showed up in the Spellbooks and Horoscopes collab. Get your real life things sorted out first – don’t let your blog take over your life unless blogging is your job/money source.
(By the way, I saw a pattern emerge in October because the same thing happened, to a lesser degree, in that month…Needless to say, I’ve pinned down the source and had to seriously reconsider the future as a result.)
- Don’t spam the tags.
One pet peeve of mine is when people tag topics that only seem vaguely relevant to the content. It’s probably something I only picked up on because people jockey for tag space on Tumblr (because only the first 5 tags count towards the tag search on Tumblr, whereas everything goes towards tags in WordPress). I don’t look at the “anime” tag too much on WordPress anyway so I shouldn’t be caring, but when you see a huge list of tags, including ones involving “weeaboo” on anime content only because it’s anime-related…yeah, nah. The target audience will know whether the content is for them if they read the content and when they read the content – you don’t need to punch in a word with the demographic right there.
Then again, there is also irrelevant usage of the tags. Due to the “first 5 tags” thing, on Tumblr you can squish in funny meta commentary, but on WordPress, using the global search to find stuff that isn’t tagged properly is a bit of a nightmare…
(Note: The exception is trigger warnings. Trigger warnings are a big thing on Tumblr and so the warnings should be emphasised as possible if you have any, including through tags if necessary.)
Your turn now – what’s some of your tagging tips? (Obviously you’d need to tag the work/s being discussed and maybe the medium if you discuss multiple types of media, but what comes after those, if anything?)
I wasn’t sure how many tags actually worked for WordPress. I think the most I’ve done is 6, and both times I did that my post didn’t show up on the anime tag, so I haven’t gone over 5 since. Might just be a coincidence though.
The “5 tags” thing is just a common knowledge thing around Tumblr (as in, people will have PSA posts about it “to save a life”…or whatever similar exaggeration they can get away with). I haven’t actually tried checking how many tags work in WordPress’s case, so I’m under the impression more of them go towards the tag, if not all of them, especially because I’ve only ever seen one of my posts on a tag (it was a Rokuhoudou post and that show is unpopular).
On the other hand…the tag “anime” is so popular it appears in the Reader as a possible suggestion, so don’t get too disheartened about it.
I tag pretty freely, though I wouldn’t say irrelevantly. I actually really enjoy how some bloggers sneak a hidden message into their tags or personalize their tags with fun catchphrases. I’ve never done that myself, but it’s always fun to notice.