If you have a business site or blog, one of your main marketing goals is probably to increase traffic. Attracting more people to your site is key, because with more audience, you have more chance of converting them into paying customers. However, the web is a crowded place. Many other sites, including your competitors, are clamouring for the attention of potential customers. With help comes SEOThis is a proven marketing tactic for increasing website traffic. The activities it performs are truly numerous and varied.
Many WordPress users often look at categories and tags, wondering whether their use will have a positive effect on SEO. Are you one of them? Then it's important that you understand exactly what tags are on WordPress and how they work before you use them.
What are tags and why are they added?
Tags on WordPress help organise the content of the site, making it easier to navigate and access. They are therefore useful, given that building a positive user experience is now one of the key elements of running an effective website.
What does this look like in practice? Tags are a way of grouping related posts on your site. When site visitors click on a specific tag, they will be able to see all posts with that tag. Let's say you run a food blog and publish many different recipes. Your tags on WordPress could be, for example, 'Salad recipes', 'Soup recipes' and 'Dessert recipes'.
Tags vs categories - what is the difference?
WordPress also has another function similar to tags, namely categories. Although they appear to be the same, they should not be confused. Categories also help to organise the content of the site and make it more accessible to visitors. However, The key difference between categories and tags is that categories are hierarchical and tags are not - they are independent. This means that you can have an overarching category such as 'dessert recipes' with sub-categories such as 'gluten-free dessert recipes' and 'chocolate dessert recipes'. Inside these subordinate categories, there may be further, even more specific categories. Meanwhile, tags have no such structure: parent/subordinate. They apply to posts regardless of their category.
It is also worth noting that tags are completely optional, whereas categories are required for every WordPress post. If you do not assign a category, the post will be placed in the "uncategorised"/"uncategorized" category. Avoid doing this because in doing so, your website can become chaotic and unfriendly to visitors.
What happens when you add a tag?
When you add a tag to a post, that post will be added to the tag archive. If you add a tag to a new blog post, e.g. 'saving', it will be added to the archive of just such a tag. This can, of course, be very useful for the reader: when he or she clicks on the "saving" tag, he or she will be able to browse through all posts on this topic easily and quickly. In addition, Google will understand that all the posts in this archive relate to one topic.
Tags vs metatags - are they the same thing?
It is also worth pointing out the difference between tags and metatags, with which they can be confused due to the presence of the word 'tag' in both terms. Despite the coincidence in name, the terms are by no means synonymous. Tags are used to categorise posts and pages on your website, while metatags are used to describe the page itself. Unlike tags, which can be added directly to posts in the content editor, metatags are added manually using code or by using the corresponding WordPress plugin.
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When is it worth using tags?
You already know a few facts about tags. What to do with them then? When to use them? The simplest rule of thumb is that if each archive were to contain only 1 or 2 posts, they are then not very useful and should be abandoned. Firstly, they won't help users find other related posts. Secondly, they also won't help Google understand what the page is about.
With this in mind, remember to:
- do not add too many tags to one post
- do not use tags that do not link the post to any other post on your site
How do I add tags in WordPress? Step-by-step instructions
Just adding tags in WP is child's play. All you need to do is:
In the WordPress administration panel, click "Entries" → "Add new"
Then find the "Tags" box on the right sidebar
Enter selected tags, separated by commas
Of course, more problems than simply adding tags are caused by their selection. Above all, remember to:
carry out research and find out what potential website users are looking for
track the themes/issues that appear most frequently in your posts - these are likely to be your best tags
do not use the same terms in categories and tags. This confuses both search engines and site visitors. Use categories for more general or overarching topics, and tags for more specific ones
Tags vs SEO - how not to destroy your site's visibility?
When it comes to maximising SEO results, relevance of tags is the key to higher rankings. It is extremely important to create content that naturally lends itself to specific tags.
By using tags incorrectly, not only will you not make it easier, but you may even make it more difficult for users to navigate your site. However, they are not the only ones who will 'suffer' from using tags incorrectly - it will also be detrimental to your site's SEO. It is sometimes the case that some blogs have more tag pages than the content itself. This is a mistake that results, among other things, in Google reading the tag sub-pages instead of focusing on scanning other valuable content. This is a waste of Google's resources - robots should not have access to them at all.
Now you know why you should think carefully about your strategy for using tags and write out a plan to follow. Not sure if you should use tags or don't have time to prepare a strategy? In that case, it is better to dispense with them. They won't help you with SEO then, but they won't hurt you either.
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