This is another requested post from the Tell Me What You Want comment section.

The terms tag and keyword are quite often used in the same context but they have different purposes.

Keywords are individual words or phrases that describe your page and that you are trying to get indexed and placed in the search engines.

Tags are basically categories that describe your page and used mostly to get your web page found on Social Bookmarking sites, which work like directories instead of a search engine.

What’s the difference between a search engine and a directory (Social Bookmarking site)?

The difference is how the information is obtained and delivered to the end user.

In a search engine there is an algorithm that reads the page and tries to decipher how relevant the page is to the keywords that you are searching for. The more the algorithm thinks the page is relevant the higher weight is places on the page and the higher the page turns up in the results.

Directories work with categories (tags) when you do a search it looks for a category that matches your search and then selects all the sites in that category. Once all the sites are selected either an algorithm, of sorts, is run on the site in that category, they are given weight and then displayed or they are shown by some other standard, such as the number of votes they received by being bookmarked or just by the date they were entered.

It is a subtle distinction and if done right your site should turn up in both searches but since I am a SEO guy I usually concentrate on my keywords where as a Web 2.0 guy would concentrate on the tags.

The question was specifically about keywords and tag in blogs now before I go into any details here I want make sure you know that I have only used Wordpress to create blogs and I am not familiar with any other blogging platform.

One of the things you do when you create a blog is create categories that you post to. These categories should be keywords and since they are categories they usually end up being tags as well. The main purpose of the categories is so that the viewers can navigate your blog easier.

The added advantage is that the categories will add your keywords to your post URL if you have you blog set up to do a mod rewrite. You set this the admin area under options – permalinks select custom and add

/%category%/%postname%

This will put your category and the title of your post in the URL. (You will have to upload the .htaccess file to your site but you have instructions on how to create that on the permalink page.)

The next thing is you want to do is use your keywords in your title for your post. This does a couple of things the most important of which is to get your keywords in your title tag for the page that displays the post. You have seen from my previous posts that this is important for search engine optimization.

Since most wordpress themes also put the title of your posts in the H2 tag this also helps with your optimization.

You also want to make sure you use your keywords in the content of your post. Don’t over do it, yes you can have problems with the search engines by using your keywords too often but more importantly you will usually loose your reader before that happens. When you try to force in the keywords you end up with a page that annoys a human. Just use your keywords where they would naturally appear but try to use them in both singular and plural. Believe or not with all the technology in search engines they still consider the singular and plural different words.

Use your keywords as your Blog Title. Again you can set this in the admin section under options – general. The Blog title goes into the title tag for every page (at least in most themes) and this will get your keywords where you want them. Remember depending on the theme you are using these might also turn up in the header section of your site so you will have to decide which is more important to you SEO or site appearance. Or you can edit the theme and put in a graphic in the header or just different text in the header. This will require a little HTML and CSS knowledge. If you don’t know HTML or CSS you can hire some one to do this for you from places like RentaCoder.

OK, that covers the search engine optimization part of tags and keywords and will help with your search engine rankings but all of the above won’t help you in most Social Bookmarking sites. This is where your tags come into play.

The purpose of tags in social bookmarking sites is to create categories where like minded people interested in the same topics can share information and interesting web pages.

For this reason you want your tags to be something that describes your post. For example for this post I would use the tags:

• Tagging
• Keywords
• SEO
• Search Engine Optimization

Because that is what this post is about.

Now to cover your post title and tags. Having the tag in the post title for social bookmaking isn’t as important as having a title that people will respond to.

Remember in most social bookmarking sites when you are show the sites in the categories you are shown either the title of the post or the title that was entered when the post was first submitted to the site and a brief blurb or comment.

In these cases the title works a lot like a headline on a sales page. If you don’t get the viewers attention they just skim by you and don’t go to your post and if they don’t go to your post and read your post then there is no way they are going to like your post.

Since I am creating this post for some one that goes by the name, “The Anti Hype” I will add this. You don’t have to hype your title but if it is about the content of your post then it will have better drawing power.

Take this post, my title for the post is “Tag or Keyword, Which is it? Do they affect SEO?” It’s not hype but for people looking for information on tag, keyword, SEO it has that in the title and it will get their attention and possibly get them to read this post. Isn’t that the main purpose of creating these posts to have other people read them?