In this Ask Nile Series question, I tackle: Are Tags Necessary? Please note that while I may mention WordPress, the concept of tags can be applied to most content management systems and blog platforms.
People often confuse tags and keywords. They are different. Now, you can have the same term for a keyword and a tag, but that’s not always the case. In your WordPress website, you have several taxonomies, categories and tags. These are to organize your website.
Tags in particular aren’t keywords. I’ve read a lot of articles that keep saying they are. They are terms in which help organize your website… wait I said that a paragraph ago. Tags aren’t for your search engines. They help you group together a series of posts, in a more detailed manner than when using categories.
Both categories and tags are used to organize your site, but categories are used in a way to be more general, while tags fine tune things out.
For example, I have several categories here on my website: WordPress, Blogging, Social Media, SEO, and Web Design.
I never set my posts with 2 categories. Instead, I use my tags to fine tune posts. For example, I have a series called The Art of Blogging Series. I’ve categorized it and all of it’s related posts in the Blogging category. As for tags, while each of them may have somewhat different tags, the art of blogging series tag is also included.
Organizing your website is extremely important as Google has become intuitive enough, especially for WordPress websites to utilize your site’s actual internal search. Yes, they’ve actually integrated being able to search your website, a with your own search other than Google’s awesome search.
So, in regards to this, if you’ve done a good job of organizing your post and smartly tagging your blog posts with relevant tags, then you have a better chance of someone finding what they wanted to read. This could also lead to obtaining that next subscriber, social share, comment, or buyer. 🙂
Think about how you’re tagging your posts in the past and consider cleaning them up. In WordPress, you can clean them up by merging tags and such with plugins like Simple Tags or Term Management Tools.
Got a question, come on over and Ask Nile!
After 9 years my tags really need a good cleaning up. I stopped displaying them at the end of my posts, even though I do add them to the backend. I’m going to install one of the plugins you mention and start tidying them up.
I do try and restrict the number of categories per post but often end up with more than one. Even though categories aren’t keywords for SEO, doesn’t Google list them? Going through my 404 errors I’ve found category urls listed that no longer exist because I’ve deleted and combined them in the past.
This is a topic that I did not understand and have always thought tags work the same as keywords and have never bothered using them. Thank you for clarifying the two. I will have to start on using tags.
Hi Nile! To be honest, I have never really given much thought to tags. I do use them correctly (I hope) in my videos, but when it comes to blog posts, I hardly ever put anything in the tag box.
I need to start adding tags now. I’m not sure if I can go back to all my old posts and reorganize each one, but I definitely will in my future blog posts.
Thanks for sharing this info. Really helpful.
Hi Nile.
This is a great topic to tackle as I know I definitely have questioned how to best use tags in my blog posts. I think I’ve been using tags two ways: as both subcategories and as very popular keywords/topics.
Thanks for suggesting the plugins as a good resource for cleaning up tags. I’m going to check them out.
Karen
Hi Nile,
Interesting post indeed. I really appreciate your work. Thanks for sharing great content consistently. I loved the way you have explained each and every thing about tags. honestly speaking most of the beginners don’t have any idea about tags and keywords they think that both are same.
Thanks for nice sharing.
Nile,
I must admit I have not paid much attention to the categories or tags for awhile. I am sure they can use a good cleaning up and reorganizing. Another one of those tasks to add to my to-do list.
Thanks for a great explanation of the need to do this.
Warmly,
Dr. Erica
Hi Nile. I just have question about if tags are going to cause duplicate contents for the search engine since tag pages look very similar to category pages.
I never used tags myself and never found them beneficial at all.
Some people may not find them necessary, but they can really help with organizing your site and allowing people to find your site.
Tags, categories, and keywords, OH MY! Yeah, this is a crazy thing…that almost nobody understands. I think of it like this: Categories are the big file dividers in my filing cabinet and tags are the file folders. For example, you may place your energy bill in a folder called “energy bills” within a bigger folder called “utilities.”
I like your explanation of categories and tags too. 😉
Hello Nile!
Clearly explained,got the concept behind tags and categories.
Hi Nile,
I’m not using tags any more in posts. that is after Matt Cutts has wrote they have no real seo
value and the meta tags that matter, are title and description.
But, you have a point, the way you organize your site does import to google as all talking today
about user experience and structure is one of these.
Thanks James.
Matt Cutts was talking about not using meta tags… not the tags you use within your WordPress website, which are much different. That’s what this article is about.
I read it through, and now got it. thanks!
Thank you! I have been confused whether or not to use tags on my blog, and you’ve just convinced me .
Keep posting
Great post about explaining the difference between tags and categories in WordPress and also keywords.
I agree with you that in WordPress tags are not necessary to use but it is good to use them so that we can organize our site better, this is useful especially in big sites.
Hi Burim!
I’m glad you agree, however, I believe that tags are necessary… so I think you somehow read the article wrong.
Hi Nile!
As of i know tags are really high preferable factor for blog post (or ) Web page. Because of tags are the reference for the search engines to get crawled and indexed a webpage. But i came to know the some more importance of tags through this post.