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Is it worth spending time on creating tags and categories?

Is it worth spending time on creating tags and categories? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: Here’s a fun question from Las Vegas. Techguy asks, “In a blog, is it worth spending time creating tags and categories for SEO purposes?” It’s a fair question. Google is pretty good at saying, “You know what? The first time you say a phrase, it’s interesting, and the second time you say a phrase, it’s still a little bit useful.” After a while we sort of realized, “Okay, you’ve said that phrase, you don’t have to keep repeating it 8, 9, 10 different times.” So, there are certainly some blogs, including some really popular blogs who have like an entire paragraph full of tags. And they have clearly spend a lot of time, almost as many, you know, minutes writing the tags out as they have the actual content to the post. And I always laugh that because it’s really not that needed. A lot of the times, if you look at the tags, there are words that are already used in the post, so it’s not really going to make that much of a difference. So on my blog, I never do tags, what I do often include on my blog is a category. And I don’t include multiple categories, I usually just say, “This is Google, or an SEO post versus this is a post about Chrome or possibly Linux or a FunPost, or a post about books or magazines, food, whatever.” So, just including the category can be useful because a lot of blogs can give you a feed for just that category. So people, who don’t want to hear about my cats, can post them–can follow my feed just for Google and SEO posts. So, that’s pretty handy. It’s not a lot of works to say, “Okay, here’s 5, 10, 15 different categories and then add one category for each post.” But I wouldn’t worry about going overboard on tags for SEO purposes. You can spend some time on it and users might sometimes enjoy it, but I wouldn’t, you know, waste a lot of time on doing it because Google, in general, can normally tell what your post is about, you typically don’t have to add a ton of tags for us to figure out what your post is about.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

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