What Are WordPress Tags and Why Use Them?

By Jesse Petersen

One of the things that makes blogs and sites created on blog platforms so powerful is the ability to get your content and products indexed by search engines very quickly, and often highly ranking. Few things will help your business or movement more than getting repeat traffic from the search engines by people looking for exactly what you offer.

The old way of adding a bunch of hidden (or not) keywords all over (or in a big body at the end) of your pages in order to get the biggest rating from a search engine no longer works. In fact, that can blow any chance of your page or site getting ranked at all. The search engines, Google in particular, have improved their algorithms to ignore and demote blatant attempts to overshadow other sites.

As a result, a new breed of search engine optimization (SEO) has been born: tags. Tags are essentially keywords for each page/article you create. They are purposefully sought out and indexed by search engines and other Web 2.0 sites, such as Technorati.com, who gather these terms and often sort them by date rather than popularity, though Google concentrates on relevance and popularity.

It is possible to get instant traffic by using a blog or blog-based site by using tags for an empty niche on the Internet or by creating new content for a popular topic. I have two proofs of the success of harnessing the power of tags from my own use.

First up is from my personal blog, which I purposefully targeted the most popular Google trend of the hour one morning. I wrote a post, linked a video, and used appropriate keywords for my subject. That day, my traffic was triple that of the day before and the hit trail continues today. Keep in mind, this was THE most popular topic of the day on July 8th, but it managed to get an immense amount of traffic despite the competition. I have used this technique to successfully build a string of “flagship” content on various sites, including untapped topics. If you already have an established site, implementing tags on your most unique or powerful articles will enhance your site’s visibility.

For instance, if you realize that there is a void of a particular piece or set of information, often all that is needed to become #1 in the search engines is to write a post with carefully-selected tags. To this day, my two most popular posts happen to be the first ones on the subject that Google mapped.

The second proof of the effectiveness of tags is based on my brand new site. We had essentially zero traffic because we only had 35 articles on a very narrow subject. Despite the whole Internet being stacked against a new site, using tags has the ability to level the playing field, so to say. With only a few days of being indexed by Google, these searches were already getting ranked high enough to get traffic, clearly indicated by the landing page, that it was because of the tag associated with the search query. To be sure your site is indexed to begin with, be sure you don’t miss the best Google tool available: Google XML Generator.

Tags are intended to be words or very short two or three word phrases, as you can see to the right that “warner brothers” was picked out as the tag from a very long search string. The more tags you have that are accurately representing the post or page, the better chance that it will get its due traffic.

Thankfully, WordPress 2.4 began incorporating full tag support as a much-anticipated built-in feature. It is no longer necessary to use plug-ins to achieve amazing search engine results, though it doesn’t hurt to double up and use the All in One SEO Pack plug-in because it updates your titles, too. I use it along with filling in the tags field with every article I write. There are also plug-ins and widgets that display tags in either cloud form or pull-down lists; however, those will likely become overwhelmingly long before long, especially if your site covers a wide array of interests.

As you would expect, iThemes’ premium themes are optimized for harnessing tags, categories, and page titles for the absolute best search engine results by following the site tweaks and tips found here: 7 STEPS TO OPTIMIZING WORDPRESS.