WordPress Post Tags: Everything You Need to Know

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Post Tag is the most misunderstood and abused feature in WordPress. Bloggers often don’t understand the purpose of tags. They use it for SEO benefits and add as many tags (considering it as meta tags) as possible into a blog post. I did it too.

If you think post tags can skyrocket your SEO, I am afraid this post will disappoint you. Tags won’t help you to get high ranks. All they can do is, help Search Engine bots to crawl your posts effectively and clarify your relevancy on specific topics.

While tags cannot boost your rankings, they can be very helpful in improving reader experience. Tags help your readers to find other posts on similar topics. If you’ve already utilized post tags on your blog, but don’t know whether you are doing it correctly or not, read on. This post will help you to understand what are WordPress post tags and how to use them effectively.

So What are WordPress Post Tags?

Tags are similar to categories, but they are generally used to describe your post topic in more detail. If categories are the main folder, tags are subfolders. Tags provide a useful way to group related post together and help readers to find out similar kind of posts.

Let’s say, you have a category named ‘Social Media’ on your blog. On that case, some possible tags for that category will be Faecbook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram etc. But it’s not necessary that your tags would have to be related with ‘Social Media’ only. It should be related with your post topic.

For example, I’ve written a post named ‘‘3 Pinterest Extensions for Chrome Worth Checking Out‘ and tags of the post was Pinterest & Chrome Extensions. But if you have already a category named ‘Chrome Extensions’, you needn’t to use it as tag.

Why You Need to Use WordPress Post Tags?

Though Google doesn’t give any special treatment to WordPress post tags, but tags have some SEO benefits if used effectively. A group of related blog posts helps Google bots to find your blog relevancy on specific topics.

The main benefit of Tags is, they can increase user engagement by providing other posts on similar topic. If you can use it effectively, it will surely increase your blog authority.

How to Use Tags Effectively

Using Tags is very simple if you understand the purpose of tagging. The main purpose of tagging is categorizing or specifying your posts. To get benefit from Tags follow these guidelines.

1. Your tags must be relevant to the post content.

2. Keep your tags short – not more than 2-3 words. Adding more tags means creating more tag pages which is not good for SEO and blog’s readers.

3. Tags should be referenced multiple times. If you have a tag page with only one or two posts, it has no value and should be deleted.

How to Manage WordPress Post Tags

If you’ve already used post tags on your blog, chances that there are a lot of unorganized tags pages on your blog with zero or one posts. It’s better to delete those tags as they don’t add any value. Here’s how to do it.

Just login to your WordPress dashboard and Click on ‘Tags’ under Post section. Then select the tags which you want to delete and Click on Delete > Apply.

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Keep those tags which you will be using in future.

So stop tags stuffing and use it wisely. Do let us know if you have any other suggestion on using tags effectively. If you find this post useful, help me by sharing this post on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.