As of this week, story tags take on a more prominent role in Lush so if you wish to improve your story visibility then you, as authors, should choose the best tags that fit your story themes. Doing so will increase your chances of readers finding your work.
Here are the ways tags interplay now:
On the main stories page or any category story list page (e.g. Seduction), you can use the Search feature to find keywords and refine your searches by clicking one or more tags. The more tags you click of the most popular ones listed, the better the match, as the story must contain ALL of them AND your search term(s) to be considered.
Clicking any tag or category when reading a story will list all stories containing that tag (e.g. Cunnilingus). You can then click up to 8 tags, adding more popular tags to refine the search to stories that contain all of them. As above, you can twist down the Search box and type keywords or author name or select a genre to narrow it further to find what you want to read.
Between the end of a story and its comments, a Similar Stories area displays up to three trending stories that either match the top three tags in the current story OR the top three trending stories from the same category (if the current story has no tags). This acts like a "You enjoyed this story, so you might also like..." shortcut.
Since tags are now used to make story suggestions, it pays dividends to carefully choose the best fitting and most popular tags that represent themes in your story. Imagine if a visitor reads an anal, milf, schoolteacher story and your story comes up in the Similar Stories list. If they click on it to discover you've lied and your story doesn't contain those elements, you're going to piss readers off and they won't come back to your work.
Choosing good tags
The art of picking good tags is to use ones that are already there. Avoid creating new ones unless absolutely necessary. So, when you start to type a tag name, browse the list that pops up and click the best fitting tag. Repeat for each theme represented in your story. You can attach up to 10 tags, so it makes sense to list as many as possible to increase your chances of discovery.
Think about how a reader might search for your content. If you create your own tag such as 'nineteen-year-old student teacher' then you'll be the only person with that tag and it is unlikely to ever become popular. So, unless someone else happens to write an identical type of story and uses your tag, your story will never appear on anyone's Similar Stories list. That means you're cutting off your potential exposure.
It would be far better to use three tags here:
nineteen-year-old
student
teacher
Then, anyone who uses those three (fairly common) tags on their story will potentially match your story in their Similar Stories list, and anyone who refines their search to add one or more of these tags because they like nineteen-year-old student teacher stories are more likely to find yours in the results.
Unless the tags are popular age denominators (16, 17, 18, 21, and 30 are common) then it's probably better not to waste a tag for something like 'fifty-one-year-old' because very few people will be looking for someone specifically of that age. It'd be better to use a range like 'mid-fifties' if you think age plays an important part in the enjoyment of your story. If it's incidental, consider not using such a tag.
Think also about the language you use in your story and try to match tags to suit it. If your characters are a bit posher, you might consider the tag 'fellatio'. If your main character is a street hooker, you might choose 'cocksucking' or 'bj' or 'blowjob' instead. Again, the idea is to choose tags that reflect your content as well as possible.
A further note on this: there's not much point using a tag that's exactly the same as the genre/category of your story. Anyone who wants to find stories that are in one of our categories should use the category search filter, as it's a stronger signal and more likely to yield stories that match their interests. Tags are used to refine the search and provide additional context about specific thematic elements in your story. Note that the tag refiner will filter out any tags that exactly match any genre chosen as a category search parameter.
Tagging summary
To increase the chances of exposure and allow readers to find content they will enjoy:
Choose relevant tags that represent story themes in which you think people might be interested to search.
Choose from existing tags where possible and do not create your own unless absolutely necessary and you think others will start to use them.
Choose popular tags where possible.
Choose appropriately worded tags that fit the narrative style of the story.
Use as many of the 10 available tag slots as you can, but don't put tags in for the sake of it to fill up empty slots. Relevance is key. Microfiction stories may, for example, employ far fewer due to the limited word count of those stories.
Hopefully the above information will help you select the perfect tags for your story that allow readers to find your work and enjoy it.
I like the site suggesting other stories, too.
