SEO Tags for WordPress

In a recent article, SEO Blogging 101 - How to Write Better Blog Posts for People and Spiders, we covered the basics on how to write better blog posts for people and more effective blog posts for search engine spiders. We are now going to get a little more granular and talk about the utilization of "tags" when writing a WordPress blog post.

If you are a bit confused about "tags," trust me, you are not alone! All content management systems now use tags and most social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube and Myspace also use tags to identity videos, pictures, music, etc.

Tags allow your site visitors to quickly find topics of interest and offer another way to navigate the content on your website. Tags can also be very effective for SEO, if they are used correctly.Opening up Categories or Tags to the Search Engines

We have found that it's best to allow the search engines to spider either category pages or tag pages -never both. The most important aspect of opening up tags or categories to the search engines is making sure the page is only showing an 'excerpt' of a blog post rather than the entire post. Otherwise, it might be seen as duplicate content by the search engines.

Our basic rule of thumb regarding the use of tags or categories is this: If you are writing 2 to 3 blog posts per week, we highly recommend that you open up tags to the search engines. If you are only writing 1 to 4 blog posts per month, we recommend that you open up categories to the search engines. Again, never both.WordPress Tags and "Tag Clouds"

When writing SEO content on a WordPress blog system, tags are great for SEO and they also help organize content on your site with the use of a "tag cloud." Tag clouds are funny looking creatures and get even funnier looking with time as the most frequently used tags GROW in size.

Tag clouds have become an extremely popular navigation tool for site visitors. When they click on a tag within a tag cloud, they are then brought to an article feed page of of related posts.

When you are creating tags, it's extremely important that you keep them uniform and that all your tags are either upper case or lower case because if you don't, your tag cloud will become a useless, disorganized mess.

For example, let's say that you write a post about foreclosures in North Carolina and tag your post "Foreclosures in North Carolina." Down the road, you write another post about foreclosures in North Carolina, but you tag your post "North Carolina Foreclosures." What you have actually done is created "two separate tag feeds" for the same topic.

Now, when a site visitor clicks on "Foreclosures in North Carolina" within your tag cloud, only the posts tagged in that exact same way will show up in the tag feed, even though you may have ten other great posts about foreclosures tagged as "North Carolina Foreclosures."

Another important reason to keep your tags uniform is that blog posts and articles will often show up in the search results under a specific tag and the more relevant posts you have under the same tag, the more authority and SEO juice your website will get for it.

I hope this post on tags will help you create better tags for your website navigation and site visitors and more effective tags for the search engines.

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