As community manager, one of the things I'm most encouraged by is how Self-Storage Talk users generally have a desire to see the forum grow and develop. They see the value in having more users and regular visitors on the site because more users means more depth and quality of discussions.

Here is one simple action that everyone can take: When starting a thread, add tags in the field under the body text box before you hit “Submit New Thread.”  Have you noticed this area?

After you've finished typing your post, take a few seconds to think about what your post was about. Maybe you posted a thread asking for advice on what software you should buy for your facility. Example tags would include “self-storage software,” “management software,” “buy software” and “software advice.” If you posted a thread with a lien auction question, you might enter, “self-storage liens,” “self-storage auction,” “lien law,” “conduct auction,” and “lien law help.”

Why spend extra time entering tags? Basically, a tag's role on the Internet is to categorize content and give search engines (sites like Google, as well as internal search functions such as the one on Self-Storage Talk) extra clues as to what users are searching for.

If a user searches for “self-storage real estate,” content that's tagged with these keywords have a better chance of returning a result than content that's not tagged. If you're hoping for your thread to be read by more people, tags can help make that happen. Also, tags improve navigation and can help people find the information they're looking for much more quickly.

A few suggestions for tags:

Even though the field will let you enter up to 25 tags, it's usually detrimental to tag a thread so heavily. Five to seven tags will suffice, and even two or three are good.

The best tags are two-to-four-word phrases. Single-word phrases such as “storage” don't hurt, but they aren't as effective because they aren't quite specific enough to sort the thread from other content.

Similarly, long keyword phrases—full sentences—are too clunky to be effective topics. Do your best to spell tagged words and phrases correctly. Though capitalization doesn't matter, spelling will determine whether or not the tag has any benefit.

On a larger level, tags help the site overall by getting more traffic, but that's a subject for another post. In the meantime, feel free to start entering tags if you aren't already. Trust me: It will enhance the SST experience.