How To Use Tags In Blossom CMS

Friday, March 2, 2012

Blossom CMS uses a tagging system to automatically link similar content. At first it might be hard to get used to if you've never used blogging software or social networks before so I thought I'd take some time to explain what a tag is and how to use it to get the most out of Blossom CMS.

What Are Tags

Content tagging has been around since around 2004. It has become more common lately because of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and others. Tagging is known by a few different names like content tagging, collaborative tagging, social tagging and others. In general, tagging is the practice of creating and managing labels (tags) that categorize content using simple keywords.

Traditionally, categories only allowed you to place content into one or two categories. Tagging allows site owners to freely choose the keywords that describe content and does not limit how many tags can be attached to a specific piece of content.

How Do I use Them In Blossom CMS

Blossom takes all the content on your site and finds other related pieces and displays them is a sidebar. This brings attention to other content a visitor might have missed if they cam searching for a certain topic and is designed to keep them on your site longer by maintaining their interest.

For this example on tagging we're going to pretend we are using Blossom CMS for a website about dogs. Everything under the sun related to dogs. Now we want to add your first piece of content. First we're going to have to create a page.

Next we'll add our content and for this example lets say we're going to make a page about Border Collies. Border Collies originate from Scotland, are used for herding, very intelligent, and extremely energetic, acrobatic and athletic. This is some of the content you are going to add to this page.

When we select which tags you want to use for this content the obvious choice would be "dogs." However our whole site is about dogs so we wouldn't want to use that because every page would like to every other page which would defeat the purpose of linking like content.

At this point, we should be thinking about the kind of content we're going to be adding to our site. Are we going to talk about working dogs, dogs sports or dog breeds. If so, those are the kind of tags we want to associate with the content. This way when visitors are reading this page they might also want to read about other "breeds", "dog competitions", or other "working dogs".

Now after some time you have prepared another piece of content about German Shepherds. The German Shepherd is a working dog from Germany used originally for herding and guarding sheep. It is used by police and military forces because of its strength, intelligence and abilities in obedience training.

Now we know already that "dogs" is not an ideal tag because topic of our site is dogs. But for this post we could use tags like "breeds" or "working dogs."

Some time later you create a page about general grooming for dogs. On that page you use the tag "grooming".

How Linking Tags Works

When you add tags to your content and a visitor is looking at your pages. It scours your content for tags relating the the page they are currently on. Lets take our example of Border Collies and German Shepherds. Lets also say that we decided to use only one tag for these pages for the sake of simplicity. "breeds."

When a visitor is reading your page about Border Collies they will also see a link in the sidebar for German Shepherds. They will not see the link to your grooming page because it is not related to dog breeds.

In the end how you choose to use content tags in Blossom is entirely up to you. You may even find new ways to use tags not mentioned in the article. Hope this gives a good head start.

Posted By Chris Robinson
Tagged with Blossom CMS Content Management