First, remember there is no recommended or maximum number of tags. However, know that with each tag created a page is created on your site which could potentially weigh down your site and is more to manage. So you want to keep them as streamlined as possible.
As you begin to think about your site rebranding, you should consider organizing/deleting/consolidating your tags. This process can be a lengthy one so the sooner you do it the better. Here are some tips on how Tampa Bay went from 3500+ tags to less than 59.
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- We started by deleting all tags that had 0 posts. *Why would there be tags with 0 posts? Because the events and posts share tags and users who enter an event may create a tag. We are looking into a solution for this so stay tuned on that.
- Then we deleted all tags with less than 5 posts. No, I didn’t create redirects or ask for redirects to be created because it’s a waste of time for Tampa Bay because we don’t ever share links to our tags landing pages. So I’ll just monitor our Google Analytics periodically to see if we have any error pages show up. But likely not.
- After doing that it literally narrowed down our tags to 150ish.
- Then I looked at our categories and deleted any tags that were duplicates of the categories.
- Next, I looked at plural, for instance, we had working mom and working moms. I kept the plural only because it had more posts than the singular. I selected the # next to the tag and made sure that the posts had the new updated plural form of the tag. I just did a quick edit and added the new tag so I didn’t have to click into each post. This narrowed our tags now to less than a 100.
- Then I went through and looked at Google Analytics to see what people were searching for on our site. You can find that by going to Behavior-Site Search-Search Terms. Then I changed the date to the past year to get a good sample. I noticed that a lot of people searched for birth story and giveaway so I made sure to keep those tags.
- Finally, I looked at the Content Drilldown report. You can get that by going to Behavior – Site Content- Content Drilldown. Then in the results, I found the /category/. I used this to determine what categories people were navigating to our site. I had already redone my categories before tags. But I noticed that a lot of people went to our now-deleted pregnancy one, so I made sure to have a tag for that. Same for working moms and fitness.
- Going forward, we aren’t allowing our contributors to add categories or tags to avoid this overload happening again.
Here’s a link to our final tag list. NOTE this is highly geared towards our users so yours is probably different. But hopefully, it helps as you’re navigating tags!
For more information on categories or tags, check out our How-To document that walks you through step by step or for our visual learners check out this video.
If you have any questions going forward, please feel free to email Kelly Kennedy at [email protected].