How does the "My Tags" customer dashboard feature work?

Question

My knowledge concerning tags amounts to the fact that tags can be attached to messages (either within the message or separately at the bottom of the message) to allow your content to become searchable using those tags (social media sites as well as ubiquitous for their use, for instance you can enter #Magento on Facebook or [Magento] on Stack Overflow in the search box to display all posts related to such tag). This is all I know about tags.

Now I would like to know how the Magento "My Tags" feature works (this feature is visible under "MY ACCOUNT" in the customer dashboard). What kind of media can be tagged in Magento? Or do I have the wrong idea? Why would each customer have their own set of tags, rather than the tags being globally searchable and accessible to all magento customers. Is it the customer reviews that the customers themselves can tag and what is the syntax of a tag in Magento?

Thanks for the clarification.

Thanks.

Answer 1

There are two primary types of "tags" in Magento - user-submitted product tags and admin-created product tags. There are no other tag types to my knowledge. At the datastore level the tags are related by product ids.

Tags add value to customers looking for similarly tagged items, which become clickable (and, thus, navigable) links on a product page. E.g. tagging a dress as 'summer fashion' would then allow a user to see all other items tagged as summer fashion. This lends the product page to discovery in much the way that a category page would do.

Extending upon the functionality or the usefulness of an admin-defined tag, an end-user can submit tags, too. This allows your customers to tag a product (admin-moderated, of course) in much the same way as the Social Media hash-tagging you mentioned in the question.

UGC (User-generated content) is a boon to SEO as it helps your store to be merchandised by the taxonomy of your customers:

Because vernacular is locale-centric and constantly evolving - tags make an easy way to allow users to refresh content on your product pages.

Usage

Tags are moderated. You can accept or reject a tag from the Magento backend:

When a tag is approved it appears on the product page. There are also frontend views for all tags as well as a sidebar view for popular tags. These features require your theme to have support for them.

Tags don't require any specific formatting. In their most desirable and simple form, they're just plain old keywords. No hashtags required.

Creative uses

Some popular uses for tags:

• The obvious SEO benefit
• Creating specific landing pages for PPC campaigns
• In an apparel store, you can associate products by a tag to have on-the-fly pages for shopping a 'look' (e.g. a full outfit) without having to create a full-blown grouped/bundled product. This circumvents the often-misused catalog category for a similar purpose.