Labels, again

In order to make it easy for everyone to find blog posts you've made that interest them, it is important to add labels to each post that you make on your blogs. If the titles of your posts are boring, or inexplicit, and you don't label your posts with suitable labels, hardly anyone is likely to read your posts, comment, or make suggestions for improving them.

For instructional purposes, here is a short list of labels that I recommend. No, "recommend" isn't strong enough; these are required labels for Writing IVc:

• books
• essays
• movies
• portfolios
• quickposts
• reviews

Please note that each of those labels is one word, and that all of those labels are plural forms. There is no need for specific labels such as: "draft essay", "mega-essay", or "proto-portfolio" ("Proto-Portfolio" should already be in post titles).

Of course, you can--maybe even should--use multiple labels, for example: "books" plus "reviews", "drafts" (an optional alternative to "quickposts" for essays) plus "essays", or "movies" plus "reviews". Then blog visitors who search through any of the required labels are likely to find what they're looking for. That is the power of one-word labels.

If you wish to introduce other labels on your blogs, please make certain that they (will) apply to more than one post on your blog, and that they are easy for visitors to understand. For example, "fantasy", "history", "romance", or "SciFi" (science fiction) are genre labels that might apply to reviews of both books and movies. Other labels that might apply to various posts are "graphics", "media", and "photos".
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Technical note: The title of this post includes an enclosure link to a search for all other posts on this blog with the label "labels". If you'd like to use enclosure links like that on any of your blog posts: "...[G]o to your Settings | Formatting tab and set the 'Show Link fields' option to 'Yes.' This will add the enclosure link fields to your post editor. When composing a post, you'll then see a field for your enclosures. From there, just enter the URLs" to which you want the titles of particular posts to link (Blogger Help).

[revised Nov. 9, 2007; 366 words]