Blogging 101: The Secret to WordPress Tags

Tags are a staple of many a WordPress blog including the free version, but not many bloggers know how to properly use them. First and foremost, WordPress tags are there to further sort your blog posts into topics after using your categories. Tags should not be a way to keyword stuff and it should not be using extremely broad terms like “blogger”. Ensuring that you understand tags and then pairing a tags strategy with category and tags mapping helps improve the user experience for your readers.

What Are WordPress Tags?

WordPress tags are labels for your content which help guide your audience to find the content they enjoy. Whilst categories cover the main broad topics of your content, you can condense and niche down with your tags. Having a tag also allows you to create an archive page on your website that contains just the blog posts falling under that tag.

What Are WordPress Tags Used For?

Tags are used for a couple of reasons but are also completely optional. Tags main use is that it creates archive pages which your readers can use to find specific content. For example, this post falls under the Blogging 101 Category, but if my audience wants to just see posts about Blogging Tools and not the rest of that category, then can check that archive page. This means that when you’re thinking about tags, you should be thinking about the user experience on your blog.

The next reason for using tags is that WordPress Reader does use them to inform search results. WordPress Reader acts like a newsfeed full of blog posts, so this is beneficial if you pick the right tags to be seen. However, I did some research and I couldn’t find any evidence for how many people are using the WordPress Reader or how many people use it to search for new posts, and not just read the blogs they follow. Myself and close blogger friends also don’t use it. Because of this, I wouldn’t place it high on priorities for what you should be catering your tags to.

How Many WP Tags is Enough?

How many tags your using is a completely subjective question and depends on what your blog is and what your category and tags strategy is. It’s also dependent on the post itself and what the content is. For my Blogging 101 series, I use tags to section my posts into “chapters” that I can link people to, where most of my posts have one tag but a handful have two. For the book side of this blog however, those posts have more tags because readers may want to read about a particular author, or genre, or age group. So whilst I have an overall tags strategy in place, it can differ in different categories depending on who the target audience is a what the user experience should be for them.

Creating Content Portals with WordPress Tags

I talked about archive pages for tags a little bit before and I wanted to really stress the importance of them. Having somewhere to link to which allows you to say “here’s all my content on THIS SPECIFIC TOPIC” is so helpful for you and your readers. It helps you get more views as they may read through multiple posts instead of just one, it allows to to promo your content on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc in response to questions, and it creates a Content Portal that is evergreen in it’s helpfulness.

Do WordPress Tags Help with SEO?

There’s an assumption that WP Tags help with SEO which isn’t really the case. Whilst including keywords in multiple places can help your post’s SEO, there’s no proof that Google or other search engines use the tags in their algorithm. If anything Google will be focusing on your title, headers, actual content and images to understand what your post is and ranking it. Plus, for most blogs you shouldn’t be using the same keyword for multiple posts and if you’re using tags for user experience then having one post under a tag isn’t helpful. Whilst you can use your keyword as your tag in posts where it fits your tag strategy, if it’s not fitting that strategy, you don’t need it. For example, this post tags don’t include”WordPress Tags” because it doesn’t fit in with my tags strategy for user experience.

Get Internal Linking

If you’re taking the time to be strategic about making content portals, you also need to think strategically on how you’re going to lead your audience to them. If your reader is enjoying one piece of content on your site, then leading them to the tag which has a niche topic they’re already reading about is the next step.

If you’ve already created months or even years of content on your blog, then don’t panic too much. You can still create a strategy and go back through old posts to add in links and alter tags. Internal linking can also help boost older posts to new readers.

Should I Index Archive Pages for SEO?

Short answer… no. Long answer: Whilst having more pages that include a keyword may sound super helpful for your SEO – using your Archive Pages in search results will actually do more harm than good. For one thing, all the content that’s on an archive page can be found on other pages on your site, like your homepage or your category pages. This means there’s a possibility that you’ll be flagged for duplicate content, which isn’t good for your blog as a whole. The other thing is that people searching for information don’t want to be taken to a page with multiple options and you don’t want to risk cannibalising your own content and also risk increasing your bounce rate.