Effective Tags - Bring more attention to your question
- Each tag should stand on its own: if a tag only makes sense when used in a group with other tags, something is wrong. For example, tagging a question as
[visual]
[studio]
(two tags) is wrong.
- Pick tags that show higher counts in the look-ahead prompts, as they are more likely to make your question appear highlighted for a user on the main page or show up in someone's RSS feed.
- At a minimum, try to include at least one very broad tag (e.g.,
java
or c#
) and one other tag to narrow the topic down within that broader category (e.g., strings
or garbage-collection
).
- You are limited to five tags, and you are generally better off trying to use as many of them as you can, provided they follow the guidelines here.
- Try to use broad tags. For example, you usually want to include the version with the .NET tag rather than the language. While tagging a question
c#2.0
might convey exactly the information you intend (it implies C#, .NET, and version 2.0 all in one tag), tagging it .net c# .net2.0
will bring your question lots more attention, since more people will watch the generic .net
and c#
tags. There is of course a trade-off: you used 3 tags to convey the same information you could have done with one. However, it's hard to understate how many more views the generic tags will bring to your question.
Tagging Don'ts
- Try not to create new tags. If you create a new tag, that tag is guaranteed not to help your question show up on any subscribed RSS feeds or interesting tag lists. Again, the look-ahead prompt can help with this. Odds are it also means you're missing an existing tag for that topic that would more accurately categorize your question.
- Don't try to summarize your question using the tags. The point of tags on Stack Exchange is to help other interested users find your question by sorting it into clear, specific categories. This is not the same as indexing or summarizing the question. The differences are subtle, but important. Unlike many other formats like video, search engines can find your question using the text.
- Don't use tags that are not about your question. Again, the point of tags here is to help sort your question into clear, specific categories. Don't just slap a tag on your question just because it happens to mention a certain topic; only use tags that are actually about your question's topic. Tags that the question is not about don't belong.
- Don't use your username for a tag.
- Don't use meta tags. Even if it already exists. A meta tag is any tag that doesn't categorize the content of the question.
Formatting
- Use all lower-case
- Replaces spaces with dashes (-) to combine multiple words into a single word (i.e, Tag "
Unit Testing
" as "unit-testing
").
- Avoid punctuation. This can make it difficult to use the tag in a URL
- A number of tags pre-date the guidelines, and are therefore formatted differently. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't follow these rules when creating tags. If you find one of these, you should file a request on the per-site meta requesting that the tag be renamed to meet the guidelines.
- When naming a tag, think about how someone would search for that subject. In most cases, this means typing out the full name, but you may also want to use the abbreviation in some cases. For example, "
css
" is probably more appropriate than "cascading-style-sheets
".
Retagging
Retagging a question is making any edit to a question that changes the tags.
- Do not retag a question if you are not going to add value to the question information by doing so.
- Do retag questions to use well-known and popular tags that are appropriate for the question.