I am not (yet at least) displaying a tag cloud or any user interface to the tags (they’re not listed with each post either), it’s just an internal thing. But I also haven’t tagged a lot of my older posts yet.

In addition to bringing in more SE traffic, tag clouds also give me a good feel for what my passions are. It’s almost a psychological analysis of what topics really matter to me. So far, “women ” seem to top the list. :D

Tags also make it possible to generate “related posts” link. I’m using the one inbuilt in UTW and it’s worked great, improving the stickiness of my blog.

I think the major problem regarding tags is that we simply have too many novices who don’t know how to properly tag their content. This really got pushed on us too quickly without giving us appropriate time to understand how it works, and how to make sensible use of it. I was almost tempted to flip off the whole tags phenomena because it was frustrating and slowed down my blog writing. I’m glad I stuck with it though.

I used Technorati tags in the past so people would be able to look for additional sources of information on the topic of the post. This was because at first there wasn’t much else to look for at the blog and because it was set up as a resource for people to find health and environment info.

Having the categories at each post refer to all WP blogs wasn’t useful (and surprising at first), so I try to point people to the sidebar categories which are blog specific and I use the search site tags.

The site search tags are now in between “find other stuff here written previously” and keywords. I really think they should be keywords, but that is a research bias. Keywords would fit future posts, too.

One problem currently with tags is that it isn’t possible to know what if any standardized tags there are (plural or singular; two words, dashed words, one word; etc.) and which of my tags were used previously without a lot of work. I like Connotea and Flickr and del.icio.us which display one’s tags automatically. Some blog clients, like Zoundry, will store previous tags used on posts.

As a reader, I infrequently use categories unless I’m interested in the writer. Hardly anyone uses site search tags but I rely on them at Lorelle’s. Once in great while I searched Technorati tags but not very fruitfully unless there were very specific tags such as “Yup’ik” It was more useful to search there for blog tags (keywords) rather than post tags. That is, I’m not looking so much for individual posts but for blogs related to certain classes of information.

Ming: I have to agree with Brett. The few times I’ve clicked tags, I have not found useful results. Linking to an individual post has lead me to categories, which are also tags (but sorta not), and that led me to better information. But rarely ever do I find related content or good info by clicking tags.

When WordPress Support decided to implement tags, they pushed them to the top and put the categories /forum sections to the bottom. People are still posting and looking for information in the wrong places because they don’t scroll down far enough to find the category information, and when I’ve used the tags, I rarely find the information I need.

You get burned enough, you stop using them.

Chris: Excellent question. Do readers use them. They never show up in my stats in any measurable value, though categories do. I’ve had people also link to my categories, but never my tags that I can recall.

Has anyone found tags showing up in their stats?

Gary: Obviously, tags are working for you, but I’d love more information on how they worked. Could you separate the actual visitors from the bots? I’ve found that bots love tags but rarely do I find real visitors using the tags.

As a reader, I don’t use tags. As a blogger however, it’s a completely different story.

Several months ago, we gave up on UTW after getting fed up with the continual, time consuming fiddling to fix problems it kept causing. Within weeks, traffic dropped off by about 90%!!!! My IT partner was busy with other projects until recently, when we found the Simple Tagging plugin. It was installed on my main blog as a test.
Bingo! After 5 months of dismal traffic, the growth curve started almost immediately on June 25 and daily uniques have been growing by a couple of percent a day.

Having spoken with the tech guys at one of the bigger networks, they agreed that their collective traffic could not be sustained without tags.

Keep on tagging!

I use tags on my blog, but they’re configured as “internal”. In other words, clicking a tag on my blog brings up articles on my blog for that tag. I don’t send the reader to technorati or elsewhere. So basically, tags for me are just another means of search.

Now, the real question is: How often do readers actually click a tag? (in other words, are the tags providing any sort of value). Will have to play with some analytics stuff today and try to suss that out.

I believe in tags, I don’t believe in blog systems that take the control out of tagging (WordPress.com, as you mentioned).