The What, Why and How to do Content Tagging

In the physical world that humans have historically lived in, and still do despite the deep inroads digitization has made into our ways of life, we have been used to the concept of tags, or tagging, which have been used to provide information about the object that is not evident or displayed or available.
  • A tag could be a ‘price tag’ attached to objects displayed on the shelves of a shop.
  • A tag could be stickers on artefacts displayed in a museum identifying their source.
  • A tag could be similar colored pins affixed to the shorts of children to identify them as belonging to one specific group.
  • A tag is an identifier or a descriptor and the process of tagging is the process of creating an identification or description by affixing a suitable tag on the object to be identified or described.

What is content tagging

The digital world tries to keep things simple and mostly uses terms and phrases in the same way they would be used in normal parlance. Tag, or tagging, is a good example. Techopedia describes a tag as “a piece of information that describes the data or content that it is assigned to. Tags are non-hierarchical keywords used for Internet bookmarks, digital images, videos, files and so on. A tag doesn’t carry any information or semantics itself.” It could be considered as metadata for the content for which it acts as a tag. One could look at tags as markers of content on the internet that provide additional information about the content and/ or help us in locating content in the unimaginably large universe of cyberspace. Search engines use tags to identify content and produce accurate results. Added to a piece of content on the web, a content tag seeks to connect the publication to other pieces of content that are similarly tagged.

Blog tags

Blog posts are based on themes or subjects and tags are created in order that the post gets associated with some form of topic or theme. In some cases, tags associated with posts in the site are displayed in the form of a tag cloud by the Content Management System (CMS) where the post resides, with the tags used more frequently appearing more prominent than other tags. By clicking on one of the tags, a user can call up all the posts to which that tag was assigned. Most blogs permit multiple tags to be associated with a post.

Social Media tags

Social platforms use tags widely. Content can be brought to the attention of other users by tagging them. Tagging creates a link that adds the content to the tagged user’s timeline. Twitter has made popular the use of a modified version known as the hashtag. A hashtag on Twitter is used to collate information about a topic on the platform. The use of hashtags has since been adopted by many other social media platforms. Tags could incorporate one or more of the following pieces of information about the content:
  • Titles and subtitles
  • The volume of content
  • Editors and authors
  • Copyright information
  • Key phrases, terms, words
  • Bibliographic information
oWorkers, with its focus on data based BPO services, has developed expertise in tagging content based on guidelines and objectives, over many projects executed for clients over the last eight years. It has been repeatedly identified as one of the top three data services BPO providers in the world. Partnering with oWorkers can give you a head start in your efforts at tagging your content.

Why is content tagging beneficial?

Being reasonable, rational creatures, human beings would not be doing it unless they saw some advantages to it. How does tagging help? At the basic level, in the digital world, tagging is a process through which content is classified into classes or categories, which also links them to other pieces of content that have a similar classification. It gives a layer of structure to the publications and content you manage, allowing you a tool through which you can, firstly, measure or analyse it, and secondly, use those insights to structure it in ways that deliver benefit to the organization or company. Some benefits of tagging:
  • Better searchability is the first and foremost benefit. Tags can be used by content consumers to reach other publications which have been tagged in a manner similar to what they are currently reading, in an efficient manner.
  • It helps in creating an archive, a historical record of publications, where it is possible to understand what has gone on in the past. This can provide some guidance on future additions to the repository.
  • With the help of this information, you could create a strategy that could choose to fill gaps in your content mix or focus more on tags that are popular. Possessing the knowledge gives you the power to decide.
  • Efficient tagging is used by search engines which consequently drives traffic to these publications. This can help drive advertising revenues for the publisher. It can also drive syndication opportunities as publishers are interested in content that receives more eyeballs.
  • Tags also enable content to free itself from being confined to visibility as a subset of the platform it is posted or hosted on, and get an identity that is independent, or additional. It becomes searchable over multiple channels.
  • An effective system of tagging provides users with relevant information about your content which could be in the form of text or audio or images or video.
While clients’ business benefits from effective tagging through oWorkers, they will also get the benefit of the unique position oWorkers occupies in the communities it works in. Being a preferred employer, it is able to attract a lot of walk-in talent without spending money on advertising for positions. This not only affords us the luxury of choice for client projects, but also provides the flexibility to support sudden ramps in volume, either on account of seasonality or driven by specific actions. We can hire a hundred people in 48 hours, if called upon to. This becomes a significant cost-saving measure for clients as they don’t need to maintain staffing at peak levels.

Different types of data

Content is of various types and often divided into Textual, Image, Audio and Video content. Textual content is relatively simple to understand for search engines and for marketing teams to leverage. It can be further enhanced by adding metadata like tags for the various reasons described earlier. The other forms of content, however, do not offer a natural ‘handle’ for search engines and marketing teams to leverage. How does one identify or search for an audio or an image or a video file? There are no characters or words to look for. Natural Voice Processing (NLP) technologies have been used to convert the audio, where available, to text, for use as a ‘handle.’ However, speech to text conversion routines are not perfect. If the context is sensitive, it cannot be left to an NLP tool to convert and forget. It has to be humanly supervised. In any case, image files do lend themselves to speech to text conversion. For such data, the addition of metadata becomes key to their use in any application, whether it is for marketing leverage or for searchability. With the explosion of bandwidth available to users at lower and lower prices, the consumption of videos has gone through the roof. There is a huge opportunity for marketing teams to leverage by ensuring the content tagging of such data is done in a suitable manner. Our leadership team comes with over 20 years of hands-on experience in the business and understands the nuances of the business. They lead projects from the front and have the knowledge to guide each of them, from inception through to maturity. Regardless of the type of data you wish to tag, oWorkers is equipped to do it for you.

Content tagging best practices

Look at it from the visitors’ perspective

SEO should be a consideration while deciding on tags. How would a potential visitor or reader or consumer search for the content you have put out? Is it an acronym or the full form? Is it a colloquialism or the official form of the word?

Do not overdo tagging

It is believed that putting excessive tags on content can actually reduce the searchability of content. For a blogpost, a thumb-rule often used is that there should be no more than one tag for every hundred words of content in it.

Be specific

Because that is what people searching for content will be. Search engines allow free format typing that enables users to type in what they have in mind. Hence, keeping the tags closest to the contents is considered useful.

Provide a bank to choose from

Tags serve the important purpose of pandering to the tastes of readers by collecting together content that have the same tags. It will be a disappointment for the reader to find that there is no other, or very little, content that answers to that tag. Hence, it is considered desirable to have a wealth of content answering to each tag used. oWorkers follows the best practice of employing an Internal Quality (IQ) team. It monitors the performance of the delivery teams, gives them feedback, and calibrates output expectations with clients. It is also responsible for implementing best practices and undertaking process improvement initiatives in tandem with the delivery teams. The IQ team acts as the eyes and ears of senior management on the shopfloor and reports directly to them. It operates out of three global locations and employs a multicultural team that enables offering services in 22 of the most commonly spoken languages of the world. The centers are equipped to operate 24×7 for clients whose business requires it for quicker turnarounds

How is content tagging done?

Manual tagging

Manual tagging is always the starting point when you begin to create and publish content on the web. With tagging being done by a small group of people who are aligned with the content strategy of the company, it is possible to ensure that tagging stays in line with the company philosophy and direction. This is also known as tagging by the publisher. As in everything else, this is an expensive proposition as it leverages the time of qualified resources who could be doing other things for the company. Besides, as the company starts to ramp up the volume of content, capacity can become a challenge.

Automated tagging

When we are trying to automate everything, why not tagging, especially since it can help us overcome the constraints of capacity that manual tagging might have. There are many technologies that rely on NLP and semantic extraction engines and emotion analytics to add contextual metadata to your content. The challenge is the same as with most automation of unstructured information; engines and tools do not have the fine sensibilities of the human mind to always make the right choices.

Public tagging

This is another way content tagging can be done. As can perhaps be made out, this can be done by any and everybody and could be considered as the opposite of publisher tagging. Visitors to the website are the ones who choose how to tag the content they are consuming. They are the ones who decide its relevance and context. Some of the social bookmarking sites like Digg.com and 9rules.com could be considered as examples of public tagging. Thanks to their partnership with leading providers of technology, oWorkers has access to the latest technologies. These technologies can also be used for client projects, enabling clients to benefit from them. Delivery takes place from super secure facilities with protocols that further enhance the security of your data. It is GDPR compliant, ISO (27001:2013 & 9001:2015) certified, and able to operate either from office or from home, given the constraints imposed on account of the pandemic.

The oWorkers advantage

oWorkers operates in a cost and resource-managed environment that results in low operating costs. This, in turn, results in offering better pricing to clients. Clients have a choice of either dollars per unit of input (usually manhours) or dollars per unit of output-based pricing. Clients from Western Europe and the US report savings in excess of 80% over their pre-outsourcing costs. Besides, the content tagging work you outsource to us will help us in employing a few more people from the disadvantaged communities we work with and give them their ticket to the global digital workplace.

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