Tagging Tips for Increased Visibility
Tips and tricks for getting more eyes on your stories
Medium’s recent controversial decision to change the way our stories are distributed — from 100 Topics to 7 million Tags — has caused confusion for many writers. As is often the case from official Medium channels, the answers are few and the questions are many. How do we figure out what Tags are “official”? Which tags are most effective for our stories? If there are now 7 million Tags, how do we check where our stories appear?
Granted, they’ve told us how it’s different from the old system. The new Tag Pages no longer just feature curated work, but (theoretically) every story carriying that particular Tag. They now have three newstreams: Trending, Latest and Best.
I say “theoretically”, because there’s some things they are clearly not telling us about the new system. Sometimes, stories don’t show up on the relevant Tag Pages. And no matter how many of my prose poems are curated under the Poetry Tag, and no matter how diligently I tag them “Poetry”, they no longer show on the Poetry Tag Page. My guess? Some sub-genres of the original 100 Topics have an automatic “diverge” command that automatically re-routes relevant stories into the sub-genre Tag Page.
