Choosing the Right Medium Tags

What’s available and which should you choose?

I’ve now been writing on Medium for two months and one of my struggles has been understanding how tags work, what impact they have and what I should tag my articles with.

There are very few resources that indicate what kind of extended audience or related tags are most closely associated with which topics so I felt it might be worthwhile to put together a basic resource for those facing the same struggle.

When you’re selecting tags on 👈 Medium, a number will pop up alongside the potential tag.

This number is the current article count for that topic which provides us with a reasonable indicator of topic engagement. When you tag your story, Medium will then distribute it on all the relevant tag pages which is why using your full tag allowance is critical. Additionally, your story will get returned higher in the search results based on what topics people are searching for which means that your tagging directly affects your relevancy in the returned search results.

There are currently 5000+ active tags (620,000 unique but many useless ones) and if you want to look at what the 2D mapping of the tag relationships look like, you can find it here. it’s terrifying if you haven't seen it.

Deciding which tags (a maximum of five) is also important since the tags will help index your article in the correct categories on Medium. If you choose tags with low-level engagement, your article is more likely to show up higher in the ranking for people searching for that specific topic but your article likely won’t return in a lot of searches either.

If you choose generalized topics, your article may appear in front of more people and you may have a higher view count but it will probably affect your read percentage negatively since your topics aren’t specific. There’s a lot more traffic but you’ll also be competing with a lot more people for viewer attention.

Finding the right golden zone between very specific topics and more generalized topics with high follower counts is a skill that that comes with time and practice but we need to start somewhere.

I assessed the top 15 topics for article count and they rank as per the image supplied to the left.

You can find the top 200 tags and counts here: Link

For this article, I focused on the most popular generalized topics and included a list of the closest related tags that appear on Medium. I’ve then added a column including story numbers which is correct as of 19th December 2019.

Sorted into five groups.

Group 1 → Writing, humor and politics.

Writing topic related tag links: Writing Creativity Life Poetry Life Lessons Writing Tips Self Improvement Inspiration Fiction Productivity

Humor topic related tag links: Humor Satire Life Comedy Politics Life Lessons Short Story Writing Fiction Funny

Politics topic related tag links: Politics Donald Trump 2016 Election Government Trump Hillary Clinton Economics News Elections Bernie Sanders

Group 2 → Social Media, Entrepreneurship and Religion.

Social topic related tag links: Social Media Marketing Social Media Marketing Facebook Twitter Instagram Digital Marketing Politics Technology Content Marketing Tech

Entrepreneurship topic related tag links: Startup Business Life Lessons Life Self Improvement Marketing Productivity Leadership Venture Capital Entrepreneurship

Religion topic related tag links: Religion Christianity Spirituality Politics Philosophy God Atheism Faith Islam Life

Group 3 → Self-improvement, Life and Technology.

Self-improvement topic related tag links: Self Improvement Self Help Life Lessons Life Personal Development Mental Health Self-awareness Productivity Self Writing Personal Personal Growth

Life topic related tag links: Life Lessons Self Improvement Poetry Love Writing Inspiration Relationships Entrepreneurship Personal Development Life

Technology topic related tag links: Tech Startup Blockchain Artificial Intelligence Business Cryptocurrency Innovation Programming Entrepreneurship Crypto Technology

Group 4 → Relationships, Sex and Science.

Relationships topic related tag links: Relationships Love Life Lessons Life Poetry Dating Self Improvement Sex Marriage Self

Sex topic related tag links: Relationships Love Sexuality Erotica Dating Women Health Poetry Feminism Sex

Science topic related tag links: Health Technology Space Physics Astronomy Education Research Philosophy Climate Change Science

Group 5 → Health, Business and Education.

Health topic related tag links: Fitness Food Weight Loss Nutrition Healthcare Life Lessons Life Mental Health Self Improvement Health

Business topic related tag links: Entrepreneurship Startup Marketing Leadership Technology Life Lessons Tech Life Business Strategy Business

Education topic related tag links: Teaching Learning Schools Education Reform College Technology Life Lessons Edtech Politics

Another area worth looking at to gauge reader engagement is the popularity of publications: Top 10 most followed active publications on Medium.

I focused on the topics of most interest to me but if there are any other high-level topics of interest (like Travel!) that I should add to this resource, please let me know in comments, I’m also going to work on a far more topic-specific resource rather than generalized version.