Content tagging has been around for a number of years, its nothing new
Tags typically appear on an article page, on the right hand side or towards the bottom of the body content. They have two main purposes which we go into quickly below.
Navigation Devices
The first is as a navigation aid for your sites vistors, enabling them to quickly link to other related content (by clicking on tag a visitor would be taken to a ‘listings’ page where results related to the tag are displayed allowing them to read more on that topic). It often boils down to treating tags as tertiary categories that aren’t explicitly included in your primary or secondary navigation.
Think of tagging as a way to address the information needs (or pains) of your site visitors so they can find related information to what they are searching for, and not about about buzzy keywords or phrases you want rankings with. So using natural language is better, and using more descriptive phrases (3-5 words instead of 1-2) is usually better too - but this will be dependent on how much content you have!
Personalisation
From a site administrator perspective – you as an admin want to know what content visitors are most interested in viewing on your site. This allows you to focus on producing more content that people want to see (and less that they don’t) and also provides some insights into what content you may want to consider using in offsite communications to your supporters and potential leads.
Here's where it can get interesting... when a user is logged in to your site (from making a donation, joining an event, buying tickets, registering their fundraising, etc), Funraisin will track what content that user reviews on your site against their profile. This means you can now provide 1 to 1 marketing down to a content level through onsite content the next time they visit your site, or even through using content personalization tags in the emails you send.
It’s great from an acquisition perspective too – using Funraisin you could export your list of donors who have also viewed content tagged with ‘Research’, upload that list to Facebook and use lookalike targeting to reach friends of those donors with messaging relating to the content viewed by the original donor. Birds of a feather, and all that.
There's other uses for content tagging such as managing content syndication (generating RSS feeds of subsets of your content) but we won't get into that in this post!
