If you are a bit confused about SEO tags for WordPress, trust me, you are not alone.
A large chunk of traffic on GET FOUND NOW comes from people like you, searching for information on how to use WordPress tags and whether or not they’re even worth the bother - the answer is YES.
The problem is that many folks confuse tags with keywords or they don’t create relevant tags that can be reused on multiple posts or they create redundant tags for the same topics or they get tag happy with a lot of useless and generic tags. More often than not, it’s a combo of all of the above.
Hot Topic Navigation
All content management systems like WordPress now use tags and most social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube and Myspace use tags to identity videos, pictures, music, etc. If you have a well-organized tag cloud, post tags offer site visitors a way to quickly find topics of interest on your website.
When a visitor clicks on a tag within the cloud, they are brought to an archival page of related post excerpts rather than having to wade through months of post archives to find what they’re looking for.
Uniformity is Key for Tag Topic Authority and Usability
Tags will help your website topic authority if you allow tags to be indexed and tag posts correctly. Uniformity is key. Get into the habit of choosing from the “most used tags” rather than make a lot of redundant tags for the same topic. Tags are also case sensitive so to choose either upper or lower case for all your tags and stick to it.
Let’s say for example that you write a post about foreclosures in North Carolina and tag your post “Foreclosures North Carolina.” Down the road, you write another post and tag it “North Carolina Foreclosures.“ Further down the road you write another post and tag it “foreclosures (lower case f) North Carolina.”
In the above scenario, three separate tag feed pages were created for the exact same topic and tag topic authority was diluted. Not only that, when a visitor clicks on ”Foreclosures North Carolina“ within the tag cloud, they will only be able to access those posts tagged in the same way, even though you may have a number of related posts tagged in a slightly different manner.
Cleaning Up Your Tags and Tag Cloud
If your tag cloud is messy and filled with a lot of redundant tags, I highly recommend that you do a little tag house cleaning. Yes, this may seem like a tedious task, but trust me, the topic authoiry and usability benefits you will garner from taking a few steps back and fixing your tags will be worth the effort.
Neat and Pretty Tags and Tag Cloud
The tag cloud to the rignt, created by http://www.stynesgroup.com/, is a good example of how a tag cloud should look . The tags are neat, organized, uniform and geo-targeted (real estate). Nice job StynesGroup. You get!
Opening up Tags or Categories in Your Sitemap and SEO Settings
Either categories OR tags should be indexed, never both and you can choose what you allow in your XML Sitemap under ”Sitemap Content.” Next, make sure “Use Noindex for Archives” and “Use Noindex for Categories” is checked and “Use Noindex for Posts” is unchecked.
When to Use Tags or Categories
If you publish 2 to 3 blog posts per week, I recommend indexing tags. If you are only writing 1 to 4 blog posts per month, I recommend indexing categories. Again, choose one or the other. If you choose to open up tags to search engines, make sure your tag archival pages display post excerpts rather than entire posts to avoid duplicate content issues.
Setting WordPress for Tags
If you are blogging on a Genesis WordPress framework (highly recommended) or another updated version of WordPress, you can choose “Display Post Excerpts” in Archives under Theme Settings. The content archives option will affect any blog listings page including: archive, author, blog, category, search and tag pages. If you are running an older version of WordPress, you can modify your archives.php or use an archive limit content plug in.
That’s my story on how to use tags for WordPress. Hope it helps!!
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How exactly are you limiting the search engines to either spidering the tags or the category pages? Are you doing it within WordPress itself or are you using a robot text file to lead the robots where you want?
If I use the NotDoFollow plugin at Firefox I see that the spider can follow both tag link and categorie links. Yet you recommend closing one of them…
Are you using a robot file or is there a reason why you allow SE spiders to spider both tag cloud and categories?
Sebastiaan,
Good question. I use a noindex, follow attribute that tells spiders not to index possible duplicate content pages, but follow the links on them. This function is default in most WordPress SEO plugins like All In One SEO Pack. The robots.txt file can be used to block them to certain pages, but you have to use on page meta robots tags to fine tune how the bots spider your site. I run a lot of tests on this site so be careful about copying the code. I am running specific tests on opening tag pages over category pages for example. I think people need to understand their own content to choose whether they should open one or the other up. A site that doesn’t have a lot of categories for instance would benefit more with opening tag pages. I do recommend that whichever you do allow spiders to crawl only show excerpts and titles, not the entire article.
There has been a lot of talk lately about Google not penalizing webmasters for ON SITE duplicate content. That may be the case, but that isn’t an open invitation to have the same content on multiple websites!
Fantastic Blog! As a fellow Network Marketer and Internet Marketer, I know just how difficult setting up and maintaining a Website can be.
I’m currently working on SEO on my WordPress blog and I love your content as well. I’ll be back often I’m sure!
To Your Success!
Karl
I have 4 wordpress blogs and I found this information to be very helpful. I never knew much about tags or categories and now I do. I was also interested in how much search engines used tags,etc.
I now have some adjustments that need made on all of my blogs and again I really appreciate this article.
Thanks for the tips on tagging for SEO… This is a process i am becoming very intimate with and when the lights are off and the candles lit, sometimes it takes a while to feel around. Going in with some instruction steps the game up. Thanks!
Good points about tag uniformity. I wish I had read this when I first started blogging. Now I have 350 posts, many on related topics, but I probably have 350 tags too. Not good for consumers or search engines. Take head newer bloggers! It’s not fun to go abck and retag that many posts!
I’m still learning from you, while I’m making my way to the top as well. I certainly liked reading all that is written on your website.Keep the tips coming. I liked it! A guide to shutterstock online.
I’m just getting my feet wet into the WordPress world and this post helped me realize how much I can’t swim. Thank you very much and I’ll continue to follow your lead so I don’t drowned.
Why do you suggest we block search engines from crawling tags & categories at the same time?
We don’t feel that both tags AND categories need to be blocked within either xml-sitemap plugin or all in one seo pack or studiopress genesis seo settings. Many sites use multiple plugins that can block tags or categories, it is imperative that you have them all set up the same way.
If you have a lot of categories, that is better IF AND ONLY IF your archive page (archive.php) settings are ONLY showing the title of the post and no more than 400 characters (good themes also will show a thumbnail).
Tags can also be used in the same manner as long as you don’t tag a post with a multitude of tags, as Google won’t know which page to give authority to. How tag pages are formatted usually also controlled by the archive.php editor.
Every time you add a new post to a category page, it changes and acts as a simple syndication method! xml-sitemap is the best tool because it allows you to control when a page gets updated insuring that the full original post gets index authority!
Wow – great article. I’ve been using too many tags and using “no index” all wrong. Loved the info on “tag topic authority.” I’m busy re-tagging now. Thanks for all the tips.
exactly what I was looking for. I was getting my tag pages higher up in google search. I wanted to deindex all the tag pages so that my actual content can rank higher.
Thanks for such informative article
I always get confused while tagging. This post have different ideas on tagging. It surely will help me understand while posting. Thanks
The more tags you use the more results you seem to get from search engines but i am noticeing they must rank the traffic that they send to you im quite sure of this so they have pretty good idear of who is going to click etc and where if there are to many tags you just get useless traffic and a very high click threw rate
Useful information about tags, especially tag cleaning and tag clouds.