Importance of Tags on Your WordPress Blog

A tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information. Tags help to group posts together with the same keyword. They interlink your website content and help your readers to navigate your content and find out related posts. They are very much similar to categories, but they connect your readers with more versatile content on your blog. Tags are like interactive yellow pages. The tag link direct you to all posts tagged with that tag name.

For example, if you write about Search Engine Optimization and have a category called “SEO”; however, you must also be writing about “Google Panda” or “Google Penguin” Updates, and can include a tag like “Google Panda” to direct readers to all the posts on that topic, instead of everything under SEO.

WordPress Settings

In the default settings of your WordPress blog, Tags and Categories are indexed and followed by Search Engines. For example, you might have a category and also a tag for “SEO”, so both will be indexed by search engines and that will create duplication issue in the search engines. So, either tags or categories should be indexed but not both. But both should be Dofollow in Search engines.

You can “Noindex” but Dofollow your Tags using “WordPress SEO By Yoast” plugin and keep your quality pages on the search engines.

Avoid Spamming Your Posts with Tags

Do not use Automatic Tagging WordPress plugins which spam your posts with unnecessary 15-20 tags. My suggestion is to tag your posts manually and always use those tags which are relevant to the topic and you think you would be using them again and again. For example, if you are writing about Facebook Applications – you can use tags like Facebook, Facebook Applications, Social Media, etc. Uniformity of Tags is the key here.

Delete Unnecessary Tags

Go to “Tags under Posts” in your WordPress Dashboard and delete all the unnecessary tags. You can even try ‘Term Management Tool Plugin’ to merge 2 or 3 duplicate tags easily.

Few Tagging Tips:

– Use Tag Cloud in the footer or sidebar on your website to Help readers easily navigate your content.

– Categorize your content using uniform tags and use them smartly.

– Tag by Title, content, author, category, etc.

So, how do you use Tags on your WordPress blog?