Best ways to tag stories to maximize traffic?

[SnowLabrador]

Hello. I hope everyone here is doing well; this is my first time posting on the Scribble Hub forums.

I was wondering what the best tags are in order to increase traffic to my story, Animal Antics. I will link it here if people want me to. This seems like a wonderful community, and I'm glad I found it.

 

[SailusGebel]

Welcome to SH.

[Tutorial] For new users of Scribble Hub!

This tutorial is constantly maintained by yours truly and encompasses the basics for readers and writers. Check Section-C for finding more writing tutorials and a helping hand in developing your story by other ScribbleHub users! To navigate more easily ctrl+f the titles in the table of contents...

forum.scribblehub.com

 

[SnowLabrador]

Welcome to SH.

[Tutorial] For new users of Scribble Hub!

This tutorial is constantly maintained by yours truly and encompasses the basics for readers and writers. Check Section-C for finding more writing tutorials and a helping hand in developing your story by other ScribbleHub users! To navigate more easily ctrl+f the titles in the table of contents...

forum.scribblehub.com

Thank you very much. I'm loving it here. And I'll check the tutorial out as well.

 

[RepresentingEnvy]

Welcome to SH.

[Tutorial] For new users of Scribble Hub!

This tutorial is constantly maintained by yours truly and encompasses the basics for readers and writers. Check Section-C for finding more writing tutorials and a helping hand in developing your story by other ScribbleHub users! To navigate more easily ctrl+f the titles in the table of contents...

forum.scribblehub.com

Writing - Corty's Tip Jar

Think of this thread as a continuation of my [Tutorial] For new users of Scribble Hub! So, if you need basic help navigating the site, setting up your story, or an explanation of what the different genres mean, go check that out first! Now, to get some major things out of the way, I will take...

forum.scribblehub.com

And accompanying that.

 

[J_Chemist]

Oh I have an idea of what you should add. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

 

[Panthers426]

I mean, this is SH. Adding Genderbender or GL will help...

 

[CarburetorThompson]

Gender bender, girls love, and boys love all come with an guaranteed audience.

Becareful with catering using tags too much though. GB, GL, BL, have a sizeable crossover of readers. While you have a guaranteed audience, and while it is one of the biggest niches on the site, it can be hard to draw additional readers from outside those genres.

 

[prognastat]

Gender bender, girls love, and boys love all come with an guaranteed audience.

Becareful with catering using tags too much though. GB, GL, BL, have a sizeable crossover of readers. While you have a guaranteed audience, and while it is one of the biggest niches on the site, it can be hard to draw additional readers from outside those genres.

Yeah they tend to get large growth up front, but at the sacrifice of having a harder cap. Unlike many other tags though they are very appealing to the audience they appeal to they are a complete turn-off for anyone that isn't into it. It's easier to get someone that prefers fantasy to try out a popular sci-fi novel than it is to get someone who isn't already into GB/GL/BL to read a novel with those elements.

 

[K5Rakitan]

Carefully

 

[Azure_Fog]

Hmmm should I waste hours getting statistics on which tags are most common? Maybe…
Anyways, girl’s love, gender bender, and smut are generally very popular. (And isekai obviously)

Now, if you mean literal tags and not genres, add as many as you can while still having them be relevant. More tags means more appearances in searches which means more possible views.

 

[prognastat]

Harem is similar to GL/GB/BL. It has it's avid fans, but also people who refuse to read almost anything if it has a harem in it. I would say it's not quite as strong an effect as GL/GB/BL though so it doesn't quite get you the audience as fast as those do, but the amount of people that refuse to read Harem is also lower than those.

I myself haven't done a deep dive to see what tags actually are most effective beyond what I see rising up the charts fastest while checking my own stories. What I did myself is just go to the entire list of tags and sort it descending from most used tags then just add the tags that apply to my story starting from the top. There are probably better strategies for getting views if you spent more effort, but at least it gets you a decent selection. After all if tags are being used a lot chances are they are popular tags in general.

Of course if you start from the most popular it means your novel would end up very far back on the charts in the beginning which might lead to a slower start so my suspicion is that the best strategy is to get a good mix of the most popular tags that work with your story that really describe your story well and then actually sort it the other way around with the least used tags and find ones that match your story where you can rank on the first page for the tag and add those. I haven't actually tested its efficacy though.

This is of course avoiding the dark side of gaming the system like some people do by adding tags that aren't actually related to their novel simply to get attention to their novel.