Tip: Using Tags on Substack

Organizing my different lines of research using SEO techniques

I worry sometimes that a distant cousin will run across my Substack and feel lost in all of the articles about the many branches of my ancestry and my wife’s ancestry that have nothing to do with them. Substack has a couple of tools to help you narrow things down for them.

Kirsi Dahl

at

Stories from the Tree

wrote a helpful post a couple of months ago on using SEO (short for “Search Engine Optimization”) to make your posts more findable on the Internet:

Make Your Ancestors Findable: SEO Essentials for Genealogy Bloggers

Once your distant cousins find you, you want to make it as easy for them to navigate as possible - and that means using “Tags.” Every time you finish drafting a post, you hit that “Continue” button in the top-right corner of your screen to schedule or post it. You should see this screen next:

On Substack, you can put any word or phrase in and use it as a tag - you usually want to use one or two-word phrases at most. Since I’ve been doing this for a while, I have a list of tags that come up as prompts when I start typing in the Tag field - here’s an example of me typing my surname into the field:

If you’ve used tags on other platforms, there are some differences you should be aware of:

• Substack is case-sensitive (so “Callin” and “callin” would be different tags);

• Other platforms let you add more than one tag at a time using commas - I learned that Substack doesn’t do this when I entered “Callin,Ohio, Florida, Arizona, Maryland” for a post.

• If you mess up or want to edit your tags later, you can do that. (Keep reading!)

Tags work better if you add each word separately, and use as many on each post as apply. If I am writing about Grandpa Bob’s visit to his brother Norman in 1960, I can add individual tags to that story: “Callin”, “1960”, “Florida”, etc.

So that’s ADDING Tags - but what do you do with them?

Using Tags to Navigate

If you go to my homepage - mightieracorns.substack.com - you should see a Navigation Bar that looks something like this:

You can edit the Navigation Bar for your Substack by following the “Settings” link from your “Dashboard” screen.

Once you’re there, you see a long list of sections on the left - scroll down to “Website” and if you’ve added some Tags to your posts, you should find the list of tags. The easiest thing to do is (for example) add a Surname tag to your Navigation Bar. So, if I wanted people to be able to go straight to my Greenlee posts, I would add that like this:

You may have noticed that before you got to the Tags section, you scrolled by a box for Custom Pages. That’s where I went to make “The “My Sixteens” Surnames” page. A page is drafted the same way a post is - and once you’ve published the new page, you come back to this Website section to add it to your Navigation Bar, just like you would a Tag.

If you go to the “My Sixteens” page, you can see that I made a list of Surname links. This is dead easy to do - see how the tag list shows “Greenlee /t/greenlee”? That tells you how to make the full URL for each tag: your substack URL, with “/t/[yourtag]” at the end.

To create a link to your tag, type the name you want people to click on, highlight it, and either click the link icon or type “Control+K.” In the dialog that pops up, add that tag URL.

• [yoursubstack].substack.com/t/[yourtag]

The link to my Greenlee-tagged posts would be “mightieracorns.substack.com/t/greenlee” - and you can share that link anywhere you want.

What Did We Learn?

I learned a lot, putting this into words and grabbing screenshots - and there were a few things I thought I knew how to do that I was wrong about! But, to sum up:

1. Add Tags to every post (as many as make sense for your post)

2. Use your Navigation Bar to direct people to what they might be most interested in - or -

3. …to divide your posts into categories that make sense for you.

4. Remember you can make a URL to send people straight to a batch of Tagged posts - the cream of the crop!

I hope that helped you - I know I’ll be doing some house cleaning on my older posts to take advantage of these features.