Strangely Singular Story Tags

[RetroFan]

The issue of story tags on Literotica always generates debate.

Some authors hardly use them at all, some (myself included) feel there should be more tags allowed per story, some authors use such obscure tags that nobody would search for in a million years and others use tags that are redundant. For example 'incest' on a story that is clearly incestuous by title and description, and 'fetish' when there are so many different fetishes. There's also the problem of the different ways an author may spell a tag. Like if you were searching for stories set in the 1960s, tags appear as 1960s, 1960's, '60s and sixties.

However, have you ever assigned a tag to one of your stories and were surprised to find you were the only one to use it? This was the case for me in my 2018 first time story 'Janelle & the Janitor' where the narrator Janelle is a somewhat annoying and overly dramatic 18-year-old theatre girl and teacher's pet. I assigned the tag 'drama queen' to the story thinking it suited Janelle very well. When the story came up, I was amazed to find that I was the first one to use the tag 'drama queen' in 20 years, and 3 years on 'Janelle & the Janitor' is still the only Literotica story to carry the tag 'drama queen'.

Have you had any similar experiences with a tag you thought would come up more often, but it did not?

 

[Omenainen]

Not singular, but I noticed that “female empowerment” brought up all of 8 stories out of which two were my own, and was so energized I organized an event around it

 

[jsmiam]

Lit is a maze (but not necessarily amazing) with respect to the overall website design.

So as you noticed, people who use lit a certain way can still barely even know tags exist, whereas others can use tags as their primary navigation tool. So it’s not entirely choice, where some people ignore tabs. Their browsing habits can just steer them to a tag less existence.

I try my best to tag accurately. I included “oggbashan” as a tag for my pastiches de oggbashan story two year ago this time. Only 8 others with that tag.

 

[oggbashan]

I don't think you need to have a tag if the word(s) are in the title.

But very few people search for 'Chairman Mao':

https://www.literotica.com/s/getting-nude-with-chairman-mao

 

[jsmiam]

I don't think you need to have a tag if the word(s) are in the title.

But very few people search for 'Chairman Mao':

https://www.literotica.com/s/getting-nude-with-chairman-mao

Way to get lit banned in that one country known for its rhetorical and literal firewall, ogg! ;-). Love the story

Your point on tags and titles got my curiosity going. I picked the word “Betsy”, part of one of my titles, and searched for the tag. Only a handful came back, and only ones with the tag Betsy showed. That was an interesting experiment, thanks for the idea.

 

[SimonDoom]

Tags serve two purposes, and in choosing tags one should always keep those purposes in mind. Those purposes are:

1. Aiding readers in finding your story via tag searching.

2. Giving readers who already have found and opened your story a bit more promise/warning about what's in the story before they start reading it, either to further entice them or to let them know it has content they may not like (e.g., using the tag "hot wife" for a Loving Wives story will let the BTB crowd know that the story is not for them).

It makes no sense to choose tags that nobody would ever actually use to do a search.

The first thing to do is to go to the tag page for the category in which you are going to publish your story. The most popular tags are larger and in bold face. Choose the most popular tags that apply to your story. Then, if appropriate, choose a few less common tags IF they apply to your story and IF you can imagine someone actually using them to search for a story. For instance, with respect to Erozetta's list of peculiar tags, nobody, or almost nobody, is ever going to search for an erotic story with the tag "questionable parentage." So it's a waste of a tag. They might search for "toxic relationship." That one's not so bad. A tag has no value unless it serves one of the two purposes listed above.

 

[MrPixel]

FWIW...

I wrote a few search engines in the early days. A truism then that I believe still stands is that multi-word tags diminish successful searches by an order of magnitude.

Also, and I haven't run any tests on LitE, a tag-oriented search engine without a little bit of AI (such as understanding that "hot wife" = "hotwife") doing literal word matching is going to yield disappointing results.

 

[NotWise]

I don't think you do yourself much good by using unique tags.

The tag cloud gives you the list of tags used by authors. I select most of my tags from the tag cloud on the expectation that the readers will use the tag cloud and/or they will tend to use similar search terms. The tag cloud can also help you choose among multiple spellings for the same term.

Terms from the tag cloud tend to be pretty generic, so once I have a reasonable set of common tags from the cloud I fill in the end of the list with a few tags that are more individual. That might help someone who's already read the story find it again, and it might do more to inform potential readers about the story content.

 

[lovecraft68]

I don't think you do yourself much good by using unique tags.

The tag cloud gives you the list of tags used by authors. I select most of my tags from the tag cloud on the expectation that the readers will use the tag cloud and/or they will tend to use similar search terms. The tag cloud can also help you choose among multiple spellings for the same term.

Terms from the tag cloud tend to be pretty generic, so once I have a reasonable set of common tags from the cloud I fill in the end of the list with a few tags that are more individual. That might help someone who's already read the story find it again, and it might do more to inform potential readers about the story content.

I agree. I know the thought behind rarely used/unique tags is that you might be able to corner a segment of the readership who happen to look for whatever that tag is, but its one of those cases where being clever isn't going to benefit you. The most commonly used tags are that for a reason, its what people come here looking for.

 

[KeithD]

I use tags so that I can find theme-grouped stories later myself and to be able to claim that I'd highlighted any extreme elements and brought out key elements in the story. I don't spend time strategizing with them or researching how strong they are as common keywording elements. I don't really see many readers doing their story selection that way--but, if they do, that's OK with me. I just don't bother playing this sort of game. I write what I want and am happy if it gets read, but the "read mine, not his" or "gimme big stat numbers" games have no interest for me.

 

[SimonDoom]

I use tags so that I can find theme-grouped stories later myself and to be able to claim that I'd highlighted any extreme elements and brought out key elements in the story. I don't spend time strategizing with them or researching how strong they are as common keywording elements. I don't really see many readers doing their story selection that way--but, if they do, that's OK with me. I just don't bother playing this sort of game. I write what I want and am happy if it gets read, but the "read mine, not his" or "gimme big stat numbers" games have no interest for me.

This attitude puzzles me. All things being equal, wouldn't you prefer to have more people read your stories? To me, that's an obvious truism. OF COURSE I want to have as many people read my stories as possible.

For me, it's a two-step process. Step one is the art: write the story I want to write, according to my own artistic purposes, regardless of what anyone else wants or expects.

Step two, however, is purely practical: figure out how to get that story in front of as many eyeballs as possible. And that means using Literotica's tools -- categories, tags, taglines, etc. -- to maximum advantage.

 

[KeithD]

Yes, I want people to read my stories. I don't get any enjoyment out of what a lot of you write about doing here, though--strategizing and pushing for high scores and lots more readers--always more readers, better scores than you have now. That just doesn't appeal to me at all. I'm into writing, not gaming and competing. Let the readers find me as they want. This is the last stop for my stories. Take them or leave them--I'm busy imagining and working on the next ones. The way some of you approach this here just turns me off.

 

[lovecraft68]

[No personal attacks or trolling. Heated discussions are fine, even welcome. However, personally attacking a fellow author or reader personally is not allowed within the Author's Hangout. Threads which devolve into the exchanging of insults will be closed, per the AH rules.]

 

[Omenainen]

I think my singular tags, or the closest I have to it, happen when I’ve already used all the applicable tags I can think of and am still short for ten. Because I always use the maximum number of tags. Who knows, maybe some lost soul will use that exact tag for searching!

I’m unclear whether we should use the category appropriate tags. Like, if I'm writing a lesbian story, should I tag it with “lesbian”? Of course people coming through categories would know, but how about tag search? If I write lesbian romance and tag it “romance”, will someone searching for “lesbian romance” find it?

All in all I don’t use very much time on picking the tags. I get that I should advertise my story but I’ve never felt any interest in marketing. So I just want to be done with it already.

 

[shakna]

I've been surprised a couple times when using tags I thought would be fairly common as they're part of the lingo of the kink, only to discover very few people use them.

Like 'neko' is practically unused as a tag, but 'catgirl' is common.

 

[MelissaBaby]

I thought I was being cute tagging White Castle Christmas with "hamburgers".

So did the authors of 1,843 other stories.

 

[KeithD]

[No personal attacks or trolling. Heated discussions are fine, even welcome. However, personally attacking a fellow author or reader personally is not allowed within the Author's Hangout. Threads which devolve into the exchanging of insults will be closed, per the AH rules.]

 

[ElectricBlue]

I’m unclear whether we should use the category appropriate tags. Like, if I'm writing a lesbian story, should I tag it with “lesbian”? Of course people coming through categories would know, but how about tag search? If I write lesbian romance and tag it “romance”, will someone searching for “lesbian romance” find it?

Someone searching for stories through tags won't know category, so yes, I'd put the most obvious sexual focus tags in there - in that example, I'd use those three tags: "lesbian" "romance" "lesbian romance" - and you've still got seven more to further define the icing on the cake.

Besides, you can have lesbian elements outside that category.

Advertise your story using the obvious first, then elaborate. As Simon says, use the tag lists to give you more suggestions.

You wouldn't go looking for lingerie in the auto-parts shop - tell people what they need to know!

 

[yowser]

Alright, you made me look. Like most here, I take a fairly pragmatic approach (use popular tags, ones that are descriptive) but often include one outlier (often location) in case in the wild event that someone is searching for that one little parking spot outside their favorite restaurant, that they will find one of mine there too.

So I have one story with the tag 'ontology' another with 'linguistics.' Nobody else has either one. I suppose it might be click-bait for the geek pride crowd, but not many others.

There are ten to work with, might as well make them count in whatever way you think best.

 

[KeithD]

Alright, you made me look. Like most here, I take a fairly pragmatic approach (use popular tags, ones that are descriptive) but often include one outlier (often location) in case in the wild event that someone is searching for that one little parking spot outside their favorite restaurant, that they will find one of mine there too.

So I have one story with the tag 'ontology' another with 'linguistics.' Nobody else has either one. I suppose it might be click-bait for the geek pride crowd, but not many others.

There are ten to work with, might as well make them count in whatever way you think best.

If I have tags available, I put a location (country or state or city), and occasionally a commenter will say that's what drew them to the story.

 

[yukonnights]

Someone searching for stories through tags won't know category, so yes, I'd put the most obvious sexual focus tags in there - in that example, I'd use those three tags: "lesbian" "romance" "lesbian romance" - and you've still got seven more to further define the icing on the cake.

Besides, you can have lesbian elements outside that category.

Advertise your story using the obvious first, then elaborate. As Simon says, use the tag lists to give you more suggestions.

You wouldn't go looking for lingerie in the auto-parts shop - tell people what they need to know!

This is pretty much my approach as well. I find it pretty hard to come up with the last few to close out the 10 available — pretty sure I've failed to use all ten on some stories. I generally concentrate on those that highlight the main theme. The one I have currently pending, I ended up making up several of my own. I doubt they are going to be very useful — but I ain't gonna be cheated out'a what's mine

 

[ElectricBlue]

This is pretty much my approach as well. I find it pretty hard to come up with the last few to close out the 10 available — pretty sure I've failed to use all ten on some stories. I generally concentrate on those that highlight the main theme. The one I have currently pending, I ended up making up several of my own. I doubt they are going to be very useful — but I ain't gonna be cheated out'a what's mine

Note also that Laurel will, from time to time, add or change tags. She's done so on several of my stories, which is very nice of her - added tags I didn't think of.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I ended up making up several of my own. I doubt they are going to be very useful — but I ain't gonna be cheated out'a what's mine

Is 'moose' a tag yet?

 

[KeithD]

Is 'moose' a tag yet?

On nine stories, yes.

https://search.literotica.com/?query=moose&where=tags&page=1

 

[SimonDoom]

Yes, I want people to read my stories. I don't get any enjoyment out of what a lot of you write about doing here, though--strategizing and pushing for high scores and lots more readers--always more readers, better scores than you have now. That just doesn't appeal to me at all. I'm into writing, not gaming and competing. Let the readers find me as they want. This is the last stop for my stories. Take them or leave them--I'm busy imagining and working on the next ones. The way some of you approach this here just turns me off.

That attitude makes some sense to me, and I can understand how you, and some others, may roll your eyes at some of the data-noodling people (like me) do here.

As for me, I'm a nerd. I enjoy the data. I like it for its own sake as well as for how it can help me reach out to more readers. Plus -- and this is one of the reasons I keep talking about this stuff in this forum -- it works. There are things authors can do to increase the visibility of their stories at this site.

To each our own. There's no one right way to do Literotica.