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.
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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.