Avinash says, “One of the key strategies to win at search, both organic and paid, is not playing the head game really well but playing the tail game really well.”

What he means is that the diversity of small key terms creates a long-tail effect for search engine results. The LDS Church has so much content online about a diverse number of topics, the little clicks on all those topics, though small, add up to an overpowering search engine visibility that trumps the search engine visibility that comes from the major brand words.

Avinash says understanding the long tail isn’t possible when you just look at the top 10-20 rows of your keyword metrics. For example, if you log into Omniture or Google Analytics and examine your top 20 keywords, those keywords won’t give you the full picture of what’s bringing people to your site. You need to use other visualization techniques, such as keyword tag clouds, to see the long tail.

If you view a tag cloud of the top 500 keywords on lds.org using the tagcrowd tag generator, it looks like this:

The biggest words in the tag cloud — church, gospel, family, apostles — indicate the predominance of those terms on lds.org. Analyzing the search engine metrics, you might be inclined to evaluate a site’s effectiveness in ranking for those major terms. But Avinash argues that it’s more important to look at the microwords, such as finance, friends, and modern-day, because collectively these small search words create more search engine visibility than the large ones.

It’s like the iceberg effect. Ninety percent of the iceberg is under water. You only see the top 10 percent, but this top 10 percent isn’t what is dangerous or powerful about the iceberg.

Content Strategy

The long tail has an interesting application to content strategy. Some content strategists try to ensure that the content published on their site always meets the business’s objectives and goals. You want to brand your messaging so that the target message carries through all of your content.

But according to Avinash’s argument, this kind of strategy backfires. When companies focus on saturating their content with the same brand, their search engine visibility plummets. The overall clicks are shallow. The site just ends up just targeting people already familiar with their brand.

Parallels

As I said before, diversity in keyword content has a tremendous pull on search engine visibility for a site. I don’t know if you’ve seen these, but the LDS Church has recently come out with a new strategy on mormon.org. Mormon.org is a site designed for non-LDS people interested in learning more about Mormons. The new strategy involves an “And I’m a Mormon” campaign. The idea is to smash stereotypes by exaggerating the normality and diversity of everyday Mormons. Watch a few of the videos there to see some examples. This one is one of my favorites: Hi, I’m Rochelle. Here’s one about a restaurant owner. And another about a youth worker.

None of the videos probably has any of the keywords in the tag clouds above. They aren’t really religious videos at all. The campaign is to dispel common stereotypes about Mormons by presenting real people in diverse life situations. One might say that this focus fails to achieve keyword density for the Mormon keyword brand. These profiles don’t pull any search engine clicks for words like purpose, gospel, or apostles. Instead, the keywords are more like down-syndrome, restaurant owner, and troubled youth.

It’s precisely this diversity, however, that gives appeal and search engine popularity to the videos. And it is also the keyword diversity with lds.org content that yields search engine visibility.

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My rotating WordPress tag cloud (click to view the flash version)

You can also create a comprehensive set of tags that function as an index. Both arrangements lack usability. I’m never quite sure what to do with tags. My approach has been to treat them like index keywords, so I often tag each post with a handful of freeform tags that come to mind.

However you approach the organization of your content, making 697 posts (the number of posts on my blog) findable on a website that people don’t spend more than 5 minutes browsing is a formidable challenge. Common organization schemes, beyond tag clouds (whether “cumulus” or flat, list or other), include category lists, date-based archives, related posts, random posts, most popular posts, most popular posts by category, indexes, category indexes, top 10, article series links, manual arrangements of links, and a search box.

Despite all of these methods, none seems to be especially compelling. Ninety percent of users arrive at the from search or feed, scan the posts on the home page, perhaps the related links on the post they landed on, and then click away. They see less than 5% of the total site content. What do you feel is the best method for organizing blog content?

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• Congree

Tags vs. Categories

First, to get the concept of tags right, think of tags as index words, and categories more like chapter headings. Lorelle explains,

Tags are like your blog’s index. They are keywords that represent the micro-categorization of your blog’s content. To work effectively, they need to be words that people search for, called search terms.

For each post you type, index the keywords into the tag field. For an example, see the tags at the bottom of this post in contrast with the post’s category.

Tags Are Not Automatic

I thought that after upgrading to WordPress 2.3 and adding some tags in the Tag field, they would automatically appear in my post. Actually, tags only appear after you add the tag call (php the_tags) to your singlepost.php page in your theme editor.

Note: If your theme uses the old loop, tags won’t work at all. So if you add the tag template tag to your singlepost.php page and you still don’t see tags, check out your loop. See this post from echo about resolving this problem.

Actually many themes and plugins themselves aren’t compatible with 2.3. If you encounter a database error, you can either start tweaking your theme by examining the code with the latest Kubrick 2.3 version theme, or just look for themes already compatible with 2.3.

Since I’d already been looking for a new theme, I used this upgrade as an excuse to implement the Limau Orange theme. (Do you like it, by the way?)

Structure Your Tags

Once you start applying tags, you’ll soon want to bring more structure and order to the tagging experience. You don’t want to repeat the same tags with synonyms or altered word spellings. You want to know what tags you’ve previously applied so your tagging is consistent.

The Structured Tag Library plugin brings this functionality to WordPress. It shows you all the previous tags you’ve applied and allows you to apply them to your current post. The following image shows the Advanced Tag Entry functionality this plugin adds.

As you can see, you can select existing tags from a drop-down list. You can also remove tags from your list.

The Tag field represents how the tag is displayed, whereas the Slug field is how WordPress stores the tag’s name. Tag names can’t have spaces in them, so while a tag may be named “WordPress plugins,” the slug will read “wordpress-plugins.”

You can manage tags conveniently through the Tag Managing Thing plugin.

Related Posts Based on Tags

Through the Related Posts plugin, you can display related posts based on common tags (thanks Lorelle for pointing out this plugin and the previous). However, if you have 300 plus posts already written, going back through them to add tags can be a gargantuan task. I’m planning to pace myself and do a little each day. Until all posts are tagged, I’ll just leave in my WASABI Related Entries plugin.

A Tag Index

I’m not fond of the tag cloud. It looks scattered and cluttered (although intriguing in shape). However, I do value the index-style of words at the back of every book. You can reformat the tag cloud into a straight list and put it on its own page. The Codex explains how to do this.

Creating the tag cloud archive (which you can see on my Tag Index page) requires you create a page template with the wp-tag-cloud call on it. You can then style it by adding the .wp-tag-cloud li class to your stylesheet. The way I’ve implemented it, I consider it a keyword index for my site. More frequent tags appear larger in size.

I’m not sure if anyone looks at a tag index the way they look at a book’s index, but perhaps they will. Overall, I’m hoping tags will provide a way of making my buried content findable. Ninety percent of readers look only at the latest posts on the first page, even if you’ve written a thousand previous ones. If tags can integrate