Tagging Success – Why Use the Tagger Module

It’s no secret that many product entries, Blog postings and other pages on this site are Tagged with ‘DotNetNuke’. It appears as the largest tag (at the time of writing). Because it is the largest Tag, it also gets the most clicks.   Now this is great, because you, as the site content author, get to control which tag is the largest. I could have conceivably picked anything to Tag the majority of pages in this site with, but I’ve chosen to highlight DotNetNuke, because it’s not only what people are interested in, it’s also what a lot of the site content refers to. This is not possible with an automatic-style tagging system which reads the site content and works out the most common keywords.

I liken a Tag cloud to the racks of confectionary that is displayed at a supermarket checkout. You go to the checkout to buy your fresh vegetables, wholegrain breads and lean meat portions, only to see a delicious chocolate bar (or worse!) and walk out with a pocket full of low nutrition, high flavour items you didn’t intend to buy. A Tag cloud can act the same way – you go to a website to look at a certain item, but while you’re there you see some interesting Tags and click on them just to find out what they lead too.   Sure, there are other ways to find content in a website, such as menus and search boxes. But unless the menu item looks enticing enough, many people won’t click around. However, a Tag cloud has a good chance of attracting the mouse because you can tag the same piece of content with 5 different keywords. To maximize your success, it’s important to make sure the most delicious sweets are in the most prominent display.

In addition to this, Tags are good for search engines, because they are:

1. Hyperlinks
2. Keywords
3. Title name in the Tag Results page
4. Part of the Url for the Tag Results page

All these mean that Search Engines find Tags good for associating keywords with search results. In fact, the Google search ‘DotNetNuke SEO Urls’ now returns my site in the first page of results (at time of writing, anyway) precisely because there is a page with a summary of ‘SEO Urls’ tagged with ‘DotNetNuke’.    As far as I know there are no external links to this page, and I haven’t done anything special to promote this page. It all happened because of the Tagger module.

So, in summary, having Tags in a Tag cloud on our site

1. Increases pages per visit in the same way the confectionary stand increases calories per visit
2. Provides good keywords for search engines to index your site
3. Gives you control over the keywords (tags) that your content is tagged with

And the results speak for themselves: since implementing the Tagger module on my site (about 8 weeks ago), the average number of page views per visit has increased by 1.3 (and continues to increase). It mightn’t sound like much, but if you are relying on advertising revenue on a CPM model, this might be significant. Unscientific claim disclaimer: other factors have probably contributed during the measured period, as I am continually adding content to the site, but there is a clear upwards tick in the graphs after installing the Tagger module.

The most important point to take from this information is that : Tags work, and less is more with Tagging – tighten up your tags to those that count, and you’ll reduce the noise and make your keywords stand out.

Nuts and Bolts – How to use the Tagger module

This section is really a supplement to the instructions provided with the Tagger module download. You’ll still need to read and understand them to make it work properly. But once you’ve installed the module, you might want to read this to understand how it is working, so that you can get better results.

The way DNN works, each individual entry in the Blog is shown on the same page/tab, but the query string filter is used by the Blog module to decide which entry to show, or, when there is no query string, it knows to show the summary for all entries.  The Tagger module taps into this by also interpreting the Query string, and it knows when you save a set of tags for an article, it was with a particular set of query string keys.  The next time you display that Blog entry, the Tagger module reads the query string and matches up the set of tags with the article.   If you didn't have this, the Tagger module would associate all the different tags with the single Blog page, which (a) doesn't make sense, unless every Blog entry is about the same thing and (b) stops the Tagger module from being able to work out which are the more popular tags, which it uses to vary the tag font size.

So, imagine we have a tab id of 22, with a Blog module on it. (all urls will be shown in non-friendly form)

entry 1 : all about feeding cows

entry 2 : all about feeding sheep

entry 3 : all about riding horses

the page tag cloud might show this

cows farm feeding horses riding sheep

- Farm is the largest tag because we presumably tag all entries with 'farm'

- Feeding is the next largest because it is tagged in two entries, (2 and 3)

- cows, sheep, horses and riding are the smallest because they are only 1 tag each.

If we clicked on the entry 1, we would get something like this;

Url :mysite/default.aspx?tabid=22&entryId=1

All about feeding cows

Cows like to eat grass

and the Tag cloud might be:

cows farm feeding

Note that the page tag cloud in this instance would all be the same size since this is the lowest level of detail in the Blog we can look at, and by definition it can only be tagged once.

If we clicked on entry 2, we would get something like this;

Url : mysite/default.aspx?tabId=22&entryId=2

All about feeding sheep

Sheep like to eat grass

and the tag cloud might be:

farm feeding sheep

Now remember that all the tag clouds we have talked about in this example are the same module on the same page/tab.  It is just the query string key of 'EntryId' that the Tagger module to work out which tags belong to which entries.  And when there is no entryId, the tagger module knows to 'aggregate' all the entries for that TabId, which results in a 'tag cloud' look, where the font size varies.  Because we tagged 3 entries with feeding, it is going to be larger and bolder than the other entries.

In contrast to this, the Portal Tag cloud just looks across all tags for all page tag clouds on the portal, and sums up the results.  Let's imagine that there is another page in the site which just has a Html/Text module on it, but has a big piece of text about riding horses on the farm.

Url :mysite/default.aspx?tabId=23

When farmers ride horses on their farm, they do it for fun as well as for doing tasks like rounding up cattle.

For the example, there might be a Page Tag Cloud module on this page, which has the tags of

farm horses riding cattle

Now, because the Text/Html module has no query string modifier functionality, there wouldn't be any query string key defined for this page tag cloud control.  This tag cloud is all you would expect to see.

Ok, continuing the example, let's say on the home page we have a portal tag cloud.  It collates all the tags across the portal, and has nothing to do with the content shown on the same page.  Our example portal tag cloud would look like this:

cattle cows farm feeding horses riding rounding sheep

Farm is the largest tag because it is in 4 places - 4 Blog entries one tabid 22, and once on tabid 23.  Feeding is the next because it is in 3 Blog entries on tabid 22, and horses and riding are in two places, once in a Blog entry on tabid 22, and once on tabid 23.  The other tags are only defined once in each place.

Now, if you clicked on farm, you'd be directed to the tag list page, and there you would expect to see this:

All about feeding cows

All about feeding sheep

All about riding horses

For fun and rounding up cattle

Note that the Tag list doesn’t look exactly like this – the Url shown in this example is the Href for the title.

That covers the Tagger module functionality almost completely. You should be able to apply these principals to effectively Tag your own site.

I’ll complete this with a couple of Top Tagging Tips:

1. Decide on plurals vs singular and stick to it. Tags are by default unstructured, so ‘Cows’ and ‘Cow’ are two different tags, and look silly if both are included.
2. Decide on lower case vs Mixed Case and stick to it. Avoid Uppercase at all costs unless it is an acronym or well known uppercase word (say, IBM)
3. If you have a tag that contains illegal Url characters, come up with an alternative and stick to it. I use Csharp in my tags, because C# is illegal as part of a Url. It’s still obvious what it means.
4. Tag everything and anything, even pages with simple Html/Text modules on them. You never know what visitors are going to be interested in, so Tag it all. It also has the side effect of making your Tag cloud look more dynamic.

What Next?

If you haven't already done so, download and try out the iFinity Tagger Module, and start creating Tag Clouds straight away.

Buy it at Snowcovered or DotNetNuke Marketplace

Ask a question on the Support Forum for the iFinity Tagger module.