What are Tags on Website and Why You Need Them

You can find them in email providers, websites or image-sharing portals. They’re used by Amazon – the biggest online store in the world, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, or even news websites. We’re talking about tags (website tagging), which are available also for your Webnode website. What are tags and why should you use them? Keep reading to find out.

Web tags were popularized a few years ago by Flickr – one of the first websites for photo sharing. Flickr gave users the option to sort photos into custom categories. From there, other services emerged.

What are Tags?

Tags are words or phrases which describe the content of your site, regardless of format. The same tags can be added to text, articles, videos, products or photos.

We recommend always using more than one tag for each item.

In particular, when creating a website, it’s necessary to give it some order. A website has a menu, but it never lets you see contents from different angles like tags do. Visitors can see a tag cloud and pinpoint the content they want.

Tag clouds – all tags in a group. Visitors choose the topic at a glance. Selection is simplified also by the visual appearance of a cloud tag – those used more often are shown in a larger font.

What is Website Tagging for?

Website tagging connect different articles, which seem to be unrelated at first glance, but actually have a common theme.

Imagine the following example about a news site. A news site has sections like “World News”, “Sports”, “Culture”, etc. Each element of the website is put into one of these categories. However, at very first sight, it’s quite a broad classification. So you categorize another way – with tags.

Thus, for example, an article entitled “Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Paralyzes the Southern Coast of the U.S.” will be included under the category “World News” and gets the tag “environmental disaster”. Other culture news like “Documentary Film About the Rescue of Animals in the Gulf of Mexico Won the Emmy” will logically fall under the “Culture” category. But we can still assign the tag “environmental disaster”.

Organizations undergoing VMware cloud migration utilize similar tagging systems to efficiently organize and track their cloud resources.

How to Use Website Tags in Webnode

In Webnode, you can assign tags to pages, articles, photos in the photogallery, items in the catalogue, and products in eshops. In your e-shop, you can for example apply tags that describe the color and material of a products. Or when you share music, use tags to mark the style or artist.

A cloud tag shows all tags together in one block. In the tag cloud settings, you can change the number of shown tags as desired. If necessary, add the tag cloud on every page.

Final tip: Put yourself in the mindset of your visitors or customers and focus on what tags would help. Create your own system of tagging while keeping with the system in your entire website. Your efforts will be appreciated and you won’t have to wait long for higher traffic and an increase in sales.

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