by Zima

The wonderful SkaDate Dating Software Support Team is asked a lot of different questions on a daily basis. Lately, though, many of them deal with Tags in one way or another. What are tags exactly, how to use them best, and what benefits do they bring – I’ll try giving you best answers I can find.

Science first – a tag is metadata to classify a piece of information for easy browsing and searching. See that bunch of different-sized words to the right of this post? That’s a Tag Cloud, the words are tags, and I put them there for you to find related content quicker. Clicking on each tag will take you to a list of related posts.

In essence, tags are keywords that help label an appropriate piece of information (like a blog post), or content (like a video). And before you tell me you already use Categories to group your data, let me show you that the combination of both tags and categories is what makes this navigation formula a winner.

Categories are needed for a broader division of topics – Humor, Music, Movies, Food, etc. Now, tags are more personalized and less formal description of details in your blog post or video. Let’s have an example.

Writing about cooking Thai Roast Chicken with Mango and Apple Salad (you should if you don’t)?  Well, that obviously goes under the general ‘Food’ category, and maybe ‘Chicken’ if you’re generous, but as far as tags go, the sky’s the limit for the description. Thai, exotic, tasty, cooking, yummy, posh food, low fat, fresh taste, killer dish, stomach ache, dirty kitchen – it’s all about your online identity really.

So next time you find yourself writing a blog post about the nutritional value of insects, you could avoid the ‘Food’ category all together. Just slap the already used ‘low fat’ tag on it and call it a day. And when that happens, the ‘low fat’ tag will visibly grow in size in the tag cloud, since you will have two posts about the same subject.

You see, the more posts or content items are tagged with the same identifier, the more visible they are in the tag cloud. This significantly improves navigation, and if used together with categories, increases the chance other users finding content you actually want them to see faster.

That’s web 2.0 for you. Tags, unlike hierarchically-driven categories, are both, an aesthetically pleasing classification system, and a creative free-form navigation boost for your content.

Within SkaDate dating script, tags are used for blog posts and videos. Access tags settings by going to Admin Area/Global Configuration/Additional Setting and let your members enjoy the new-found flexibility.