I learned a few weeks ago about “tag stuffing.” I also learned my many tags may be hindering my page ranking instead of helping it.

Spammers will put a lot of tags into their sites (even duplicate tags), hoping to rank high in internet searches.  They will also put in tags that aren’t related to the content of their website or post. You may have noticed this in spam comments (the commenter says one thing, but has unrelated links included in his comment that promote his site or product).

I’ve put in lots of tags because I think a variety of different readers would like a particular post. That may be true, but search engines find all those links and also the links in my tag cloud (see related post) and may conclude that I’m tag stuffing. This may be hurting my page ranking on some search engines.

From my reading this past week I plan to:

• Limit the total of categories and tags per post to about five
• Have keywords, as much as possible, in my title and in the main body of the post
• Choose keywords that are not already present in 1) the title, 2) the post,or 3) the categories
• Remove my tag clouds (see first related post below for reasons why) or reduce the number of tags to about twelve if I need to keep it for navigation
  

So, I’m going to have my laptop handy and clean up my categories and tags on my blogs while I’m watching the Olympics the next two weeks.  I’ll add a comment after a week or so if I see a difference in my stats after I take care of this.

Have you been using tags and keywords effectively for your blog?

Related Posts

• SEO: Avoid Tag Clouds to Prevent Keyword Stuffing (Daily Blogging)
• Categories and Tags for Blogs, Part One (eQuipping for eMinistry)
• When People Are Searching for Answers  (eQuipping for eMinistry)
• Another Post on Keyword Stuffing + Info on Meta Tag Stuffing (SEO Aware)