Comments on: What Are WordPress Tags and Why Use Them?

By: Brody Clemmer

Brody Clemmer — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:32:38 +0000

Hey, this was really helpful… I understood the concept, just not the importance and how to execute properly! Thanks-

By: Cory

Cory — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:16:31 +0000

Sandra, thanks for the feedback … we’ve already done one for Permalinks … here it is …

http://ithemes.com/pretty-permalinks-can-help-you-in-the-search-engines/

By: Sandra

Sandra — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:10:30 +0000

Thank you Jesse for this informative article on what a Tag is and why they are important.

WordsPress, All In One SEO all have fields for this but never explain why I’d want to bother with tags.

I’d also like to see you cover:

Permalinks
Categories

And best practices for their use in SEO.

Thank you!

By: Jesse Petersen

Jesse Petersen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:56:00 +0000

Thank you for your comments, Arthur. I love your site content. I enjoyed your Vista post.

By: Arthur

Arthur — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:27:30 +0000

My blog has been up for quite some time and there was an option to use tags. I haven’t used or activated this option but I’ve noticed that most blogs or websites have a tag cloud so I decided to activate it then searched the web for what it exactly do.

Thanks for this nice guide. It enlightened me more about tags.

By: Jesse Petersen

Jesse Petersen — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:29:40 +0000

Sean,

You have a good point about things being in two different places, but Google indexes the tags and the keywords found in posts separately, so it really doesn’t have any negative impact on their indexing. It’s not the same as putting in dozens of words at the end of a page or post because it is kept in a separate field in the database that Google actually wants to look at.

By: Sean

Sean — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 18:37:47 +0000

Would the “extra exposure” also look like duplicate content, though? Particularly if you are delivering an XML sitemap to google, google will see that the same posts are showing up in two different areas, so it would actually identify the post as duplicate content. If you removed the tag/* directory from index consideration, it may make for a more accessible website to your visitors, which google may appreciate, but definitely indexing two different places that the same content can be found is not the best SEO principle.

Thanks for this post, though. Very helpful.

By: Jesse Petersen

Jesse Petersen — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:16:09 +0000

Kevin,

Thank you for your interest in this tags article. Tags are generally only seen as helpful, even if it matches the category. Depending on your permalinks and usage of the Google XML plug-in, you will receive both an index link for your category (…com/dogs/) and your tag (…com/tag/dogs/) for extra exposure.

By: Kevin D. Hendricks

Kevin D. Hendricks — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:10:46 +0000

This is helpful. I’ve started using tags more on my own site, and it’s just helpful to see connections between various posts, never mind the SEO benefits.

One question: Does it help or hurt to enter tags that duplicate your categories? For example, if I’ve got a post about music and it’s in my music category, does it help or hurt (or neither) if I tag the post “music”?