In a previous post How to Write A WordPress Blog Post for SEO , I wrote an overview covering the basics on how to write and optimize a WordPress blog post. I would like to go into more detail on the utilization of tags. Basically, all blogging and content management systems now use tags. Social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Myspace also use tags to identity videos, pictures, music, etc.
When creating content for wordPress and SEO it is important to use tags to organize your content. Tags help users easily find the information they are looking for on your site and most WordPress themes display tags around the article so that users can find other related posts.
The Best Way To Utilize Tags For SEO
WordPress also comes with a default tag cloud and within the cloud, the tags most frequently used will get bigger in font size. When looking at categories and tags for search engine optimization, most webmasters don’t allow the search engines to spider either tags or categories. At Get Found Now, we have been running tests that allow the search engines to either spider the category or tag pages, but never both. The most important aspect of opening a tag or category page up to the search engines is to make sure the page is only showing an ‘excerpt’ of the article rather than the entire article. Otherwise it is seen by the search engines as duplicate content.
If your site produces at least 2-3 articles per week, we recommend that you open up the tags to search engines. If you are only producing 1-4 articles per month on your site, we recommend that you open up the category pages. DO NOT DO BOTH. Make sure that you pick your tag descriptions wisely and that you use all upper case or all lower case tags. Otherwise, the search engines will see them as duplicate content and you will get penalized.