I’ve been very busy lately doing lots of research for my next Lunchtime Learning video all about search engine optimisation (SEO) so I can give you top-notch information on that subject. Such a fascinating subject, especially since it has changed so drastically since last year.

But lo and behold, I’ve just found out I’ve been doing it all wrong over these past years! Why – what have I done?

I’ve always been a good girl and have been adding lots of my tags to my posts, carefully selecting them from the content so that they are relevant. I thought I was doing a good thing regarding SEO as surely the search engines would pick on on at least some of these tags to index my post.

But – overstuffing yourself with good things (like chocolate cake) will only make you sick. The old adage “Too many cooks spoil the broth” comes to mind, as putting all the herbs and spices from your kitchen into your soup will probably make it taste revolting and nobody will want to eat it.

Just like the over-saturation of keywords in blog posts pre-2013, which made them totally unreadable and frankly ridiculous, over-saturation of tags will do the same thing. The poor old spiders, when confronted with all these tags, get totally confused and their response would be to not index anything at all because they don’t know which one is the most important.

Would you like to know how many tags I have collected in this blog since I started it? 1,467! Yes, that many! No wonder the poor spiders were running away as fast as their virtual legs would take them.

This requires some serious measures to rectify the situation. There is a lot of tags to go through, but I need to sort out which ones are the most relevant to what I write about, and then use them more frequently. The more I use them, the more they become attractive to search engines to ultimately optimise my blog posts.

So, the answer is, once you’ve worked out the best keyword for your post, select up to four sub-keywords which will become the post’s tags. If they have been already used in previous posts, so much the better. They will need to be added to your post in the tag menu purely to supplement and lend weight to the primary keyword, and also in whatever SEO plugin you have chosen.

You don’t need to choose the same five for every post, but a healthy select few that are totally relevant will be helpful. That’s why it’s worth pre-planning your posts beforehand, or at least being clear on the subject matter or the readership you’re aiming at.