Tags for Kissell

What is a tag, and why are they boosting Larry Kissell?
Tags are key words that are used to organize blog posts into collections based on subject. The tag "NAFTA" should link to stories about the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the tag "Larry Kissell" should link to stories about the Eighth District's next Congressman.

Why are we talking about this?
Better tags will help us win elections and influence legislation.

How?
Many people, particularly undecideds, rely on Google and other search engines to research the candidates (or issues). What they learn from the search may well influence their vote.

For instance, if someone searches "Robin Hayes" you want him or her to find your blog post on how Hayes sold out North Carolina with his vote in favor of NAFTA, not Hayes' own website talking about how he is a patriotic man of the people. Tags help you do this by pulling all the posts labeled with the tag together onto one page.

If BlueNC has a consistent set of tags used to describe the blog posts housed here, the pages associated with those tags will rank higher in search results.

What are you trying to sell us?
We need to take all these tags: "Kissell," "Kissell for NC-08," "Kissell for Congress," "Larry is my man," "Larty Kissell," and "Kissell speaks out against NAFTA," and combine them into one united tag: Larry Kissell. By merging the tags we provide an organizational structure that is better understood by computers and people alike.

Once we standardize all the tags, you need to use the standard tags. You will still have to option to create new tags, but we'll do much better if you select existing tags from the drop-down menu. A constant set of tags will help more people find out about our community and the ideas we advance.

What makes a tag good or bad?
Tags are good if they are like Bush after 9/11: simple and popular. Tags are bad when they are like Bush's plan for the invasion of Iraq: obnoxious, uncoordinated, and poorly thought out.

This is a bad, useless tag: this tag makes baby Jesus cry

How many tags should a post have?
I'm not sure, probably more than two, but less than ten.

What if you're writing about a new subject?
Then by all means create a new tag. But if you can find some existing tags to describe your post, use them as well so that you get more readers.

What if the tag that is the most popular isn't the best term we should use?
Please DO use the most popular term, and also let BlueNC know that you think the tag should be changed. There are some good reasons NOT to edit the tags after they are widely used, but there are probably some circumstances in which we need to edit the tags too.

Dude, you're cramping my style.
Unless your style is more important to you than the progressive community benefiting from your ideas and passion, use the title and body fields as creatively as you can, but let the tags be standard, dull, and effective.

What in God's name are you talking about?
Anyone who is logged into BlueNC can create their own blog posts. A blog post consists of a title, some tags, and a body. I'm talking about how we can use tags to help potential readers find BlueNC blog posts, and thereby have increase our community's impact.

How do tags help with search results?
Most of the internet is powered by logical code, however Google and other search engines are power by magic gnomes. The gnomes like tags. We have to scratch their back if we want them to scratch ours.

Tags group blog posts together to form a page of related content. Google indexes those pages.

Your jokes aren't very good.
I know, but it's the thought that counts right?