Using Tags

Good morning from Seattle. Good afternoon to the rest of the country. We’re starting a little bit later than usual. We usually start at 11 AM pacific time. We’re doing Common Sense Legal Blogging in 45 chapters. This will become the precursor to a book, 45 chapters long obviously. Let me reframe this a little bit; we’re doing a chapter a day. This will run all the way until about the middle of July. We’re up to chapter 14 today.

I would like to just make one comment before this. Many of you might be in cities that had been affected by the riots, peaceful protests, very peaceful protests, but certainly riots. Where you’re looking behind me, right out here, there were probably 10,000 people peacefully protesting on Saturday, but by late Saturday afternoon, five blocks, maybe four blocks down the street, riots started with police cars lit on fire. Windows destroyed, all the stores vandalized; it’s a very sad situation for Seattle.

It first started on Friday right out my window, right here with a smaller crowd, very peaceful until they got beaten with sticks and sprayed pepper spray at them, it got a little bit disruptive after that. As I told my team this morning here in Seattle, we have to be really sensitive to what’s going on in the country as to not only the pandemic, but now 25% unemployment rate and riots going on. Riots just don’t happen. There’s something going on below the surface.

I think we have to be thinking about what we can do for other people because that’s the best thing we can do as lawyers. What can we do for others? That’s where the Blog for Good campaign started and then getting the legal blogging in 45 chapters, a chapter a day really started with how we can help folks. Today’s on tags, and tags in a blog are nothing more than as you write a post, you tag the content.

Imagine looking at a blog, and you were thinking about categories and categories might be if we’re thinking about the Facebook blog. You’ve got the title of the blog, published by your body of content right here. Over here, you’ve got your categories. Those are maybe six, eight, 10, max 11. Don’t have 24 categories, it’s schizophrenia. What you’re doing with the tags then is you’re saying, let’s say this is a blog about IP litigation in a particular district court. Or let’s say it’s about Family Law in a particular state.

You’ve got categories here which are the major things that it might be covering. Let’s say, for Family Law, it is domestic abuse, it might be custody, it might be visitation, it might be the divorce, it could be six or eight other things. Let’s say something becomes a smaller item. Let’s say it references a particular case in your state, that’s a seminal case on visitation or something. You might be writing about that here, and then tag it as this case. Somebody comes along, or you want to go back and see, what are the cases that I cited this? It’s been something that bloggers have done over the years. That’s what a tag is. It’s basically thinking, “have I got my categories?”

Now, I’m going to take even something deeper, very deep. You could be writing about a circuit court or a district court or let’s say it’s a district court on a particular type of subject. Maybe if you get things labeled by particular judges, particular people on the bench so that you can see what you’ve written about on that. Now search might trump that in the way that you find it, but people have organized things well doing that. That’s what tags are.

Tags were a big deal when blogs started, or maybe blogs first started back in the 90s. Even maybe it wasn’t so big, but it certainly was big by the time LexBlog started and we brought legal blogging to the forefront for lawyers. People tagged everything, and people thought that tagging was going to increase the search engine rankings on their blogs. They were tagging everything under the sun.

If you got 14, 15 tags, people are thinking in their heads, oh my god, what could people be searching on? I better put this in as a tag and get the blog to rank for that type of thing. It’s not that type of thing today. Lawyers still do it. Lawyers can be anal in the way they approach things. Lawyers are not fast to change. We’re doing it this way, this is the way we’re going to do it forever. Don’t have 14, 15 tags, maybe one or two.

I’m serious. If you do too much of it, unless you figured out a way to make it work for yourself or for other lawyers in a practice group, you’re looking a little bit lame, and you look a little bit out of touch. What you don’t want to do as a lawyer is to make it look like, “I’m not like you, remember that, I’m a lawyer, you’re not a lawyer”. You don’t want to have people thinking that way. You might not think you’re doing that, but you are implying that to people when you look like you’re out of touch with what other people may be doing blogging.

How much are tags used today? I haven’t tagged anything in years; it could be a decade. I haven’t felt any loss in use of blogging and the ability for people to find content on my blog because I don’t tag. I see some of it, but not as much. A lot of the mainstream blogs, you don’t see a lot of tags. Again, think outside what lawyers typically do and look at what non-lawyers do.

What does that blog on sports look like? What does that blog from home design look like? What is that blog on societal issues? How many tags do they have? Just look around to see what people are doing. You want to be more unlike lawyers than like lawyers because following what lawyers do isn’t necessarily connecting with the public. You want to be doing the things that they’re used to reading in other places. You don’t have to use them, and I think they’ve gone down as far as popularity.

What’s the value of tags? I think there is some value if you were actually writing a post, and linking to the tag in the post. Right there, you’re writing about Judge So and So; you’re writing about this case, you might want to even link into that. Cases might be a little bit different because you’re linking out to the case so people can read it if you want to do so. As you refer to something in your post, you can link to that tag, which is going to cause the tag page to open up when people want to find the content.

You can have the tags appear. That’s basically metadata that’s going to populate the RSS feed, but as the tag is going to be displaying below the bottom of the post, people can hit that, and you can hit it and see the posts that have been written on that subject. There could be reasons that you could say, “I want to have that appear. I want to tag it so that people can see the depth at which I’ve covered that issue.” Imagine you’ve been blogging for a number of years, you can tag and find all the content on that. Imagine starting out, now you’re going to be two, three, four years, and you were smart enough to just nail a niche.

If you go, California employment law, really broad, you’re not going to stick out. Let’s say it was a particular regulation in California employment law that nobody else blogged on. Now you’ve got that and now you’re going to basically pick ultra niches inside of that. You’ve got your categories over here, if you’re going to pick ultra niches it might be which court, it might be which judge. Imagine somebody coming in and looking and saying, “Wow, this person really covers these things in depth.” but if you have a lot of tags that isn’t going to mean too much. If you can really focus on those types of things, yes, you could see that this person is covering those things. They probably know more about what’s going on in the tenancy judiciary or certain trends on these sub-issues than maybe any lawyer in the state of California, and that could be impressive.

The value for SEO? I think it’s none. Again, I’ve conceded that I’m not the biggest SEO expert in the world. I know a lot more about blogging than SEO. The impact of tagging everything so it’s going to come up higher in the search engine rankings is not going to be something you want to be chasing after; it’s not going to do a whole lot for you. I wouldn’t be chasing after tags for purposes of SEO.

There was a time in the early days where if we tag, all of this will come up, but think about how foolish that is. If everybody tags it, how is everybody going to rank at the top of the search engine? It can’t work that way. Google isn’t going to go around and chase every tag that’s created. In fact, as you create more and more pages, there might be an issue of duplicate content because your tag is a page, your homepage is a page, you got your categories with a page of content, your posts is a page, your content all similar. Use them; I guess it’s your personal decision. Are they valuable to you? Do you think they’re valuable to your readers? Think about those types of things. Don’t think about trying to game some system. Think about what’s valuable to you as far as tags. Part of me wanted to skip by tags because it just seems such a small issue in blogging, but after I talked with a team member this morning, I found out we get questions on tags. “Should I use them or not use them?” So, I thought it was worthwhile to cover it. If we’re getting questions on it, there’s certainly a lot of other people that have questions on it.

The last thing I wanted to mention is Blog for Good. The campaign continues. We now have 27 sites done. What I mean by 27 sites done is 27 syndication portals done for states, so 27 states. There’s five or six or up live, and a number of them are being built, and then a number are built to be launched, and the rest–maybe somewhere between 15 and 20–are built to be displayed. What do I mean by syndication portal? It takes all of the content from legal bloggers in a state, and it aggregates it in one place, and it can curate it to shine a light on the best insight and information. In the case of bar associations, they have an instant publication shine a light on an aggregation of content coming from lawyers in their state. Today, a lot of it is regarding the pandemic. There might be additional things about the suffering that’s going on in cities, in light of the riots over the weekend but most of the content coming from lawyers today is about the pandemic. Imagine what’s coming in.

Nationally, we might be having 600, 700 posts a day, relating to pandemic issues and economic related pandemic issues, all coming into LexBlog. That can be sliced for a particular state. If we reach out to Colorado and say, “Would you like to see what the lawyers in Colorado are publishing?” We can see their content, we can see that profile, the lawyer, we can see a profile, the blog, and we can see a profile of the firm, all on this publication. “Would you like to introduce it to more lawyers in your state whose content is already not or has not already been aggregated in here?” They get excited about that. Then those lawyers that are not blogging and have their content coming in here, they can now get a blog for free from LexBlog, because they’ll be in a participating association. It’s fun stuff for us. We talked with Illinois last week, we talked with Texas last week. We talked with Florida last week. It’s exciting. Maybe we’re sticking our necks out here a little bit, but we’re sticking our necks out to help people, not trying to aggressively sell things right now during the pandemic. We’re going to develop relationships with people. If we can build relationships founded on helping people, that’s what it’s all about. That’s what Blog for Good is all about. You can get information on Blog for Good at LexBlog; we’re continuing to add more information up there. You can see the map of the United States which is showing which states are already participating and which states there’s already sites done for, for which we’ll be approaching the bar associations. I hope you guys have a great week. See you tomorrow. Stay well.