Zemanta Tags and Life User

I'm now letting Zemanta choose tags for my past, present and future posts on Life User. I may choose a few manual tags additionally, but I won't turn down any Zemanta suggestion, no matter how irrelevant it seems. This is intended as a form of search-engine optimization, meaning it's meant to increase the chance of (hopefully interested) readers finding and visiting Life User from a search result page.

You may think it black-hat of me to knowingly include, for the purposes of search-engine optimization, tags that are apparently irrelevant to the post. But consider the following:

• Tags aren't like a book's index. They're not used mainly for browsing within a blog, but for searching across blogs. Thus, it's important to use the tags people are actually searching for, rather than the tags I'd choose in a vacuum. Sure, this makes the tag cloud a little less useful as a research aid, but who uses a tag cloud as a research aid anyway?
  
• Relevance isn't black-and-white. My last post, a review of The Lawnmower Man, is highly relevant to the film, moderately relevant to virtual reality (which uses it as a plot device) and Pierce Brosnan (one of the stars), and only tangentially relevant to Stephen King (whose short story it was falsely advertised as an adaptation of). Its relevance to a combination of two or more of those terms, which could easily occur in the same search, is even fuzzier. Yet I can't choose to weakly or partially apply the Stephen King tag: I have to either apply it fully or not at all. (This is a great example of where fuzzy logic and fuzzy set theory should be applied but aren't.) Tags can thus only be a rough guide to a post's subject matter anyway.
• Relevance is in the eye of the beholder. Web surfers' search terms don't always exactly match the intent of their searches, because the intent can't always be boiled down to a set of keywords (especially when considering only the surfer's limited vocabulary).
  
• Serendipity has always been and will always be important as a way of finding content the readers didn't know they wanted. An occasional irrelevant tag leads to serendipity.
  
• I'm not a perfect tagger either. I may unintentionally incorporate recurring themes into my writing, across a wide range of nominal subject matter, and not be aware of them. Zemanta tagging reveals them not only to me, but also to interested readers and advertisers who might not otherwise find my blog. Also, despite my best efforts, I end up applying a lot of tags that will only ever be used once, because it turns out I don't have much to say about the corresponding topic. Zemanta is the only truly objective and impartial judge of what my blog is about, and what it says about who I am.
• Search-engine optimization is the fuel that keeps Life User running. There's no point in writing articles that nobody will ever read. I need to get a certain amount of social feedback and/or ad revenue each month if I'm to keep dedicating much time to the blog. Getting feedback and ad revenue depends on getting traffic, and Zemanta knows better than I do what tags will and won't help get me traffic. While it may sound unsavoury, doing whatever it takes to get traffic is what will let me keep providing all of you with a steady stream of quality writing.
  

To keep the tag cloud manageable in size and reasonably useful to humans, I've set it up (using a Cascading Style Sheet rule) to hide tags that apply to only one post. As of this writing, 155 of my 185 tags fall into that category. I figure topics that occur in only one post are better found through the Search This Blog bar.

Zemanta Tags and Life User