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Tags in wordpress, To do or Not to do?

by ps2home
4 replies
Im just wondering if it's advisable anymore to use tags, or if simply to use catogories. If advisable, what is the best way to use tags?
#tags #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author MartinPlatt
    They're so that your users can find your content, so yes I'd use them. Categories are for broad taxonomies, and tags are for a more granular level in my eyes.

    So for example as a category 'List Building', and tags of 'solo ads' 'list traffic'...

    Some people believe that using them will create duplicate content, but I personally think that is rubbish, it's just a different way to index it.

    If you're worried about that, then don't allow the tags to be crawled (most SEO plugins will allow you to set this)
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    Martin Platt
    martin-platt.com

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  • Profile picture of the author Big Al
    Random one...

    Today I was looking for "XYZ Kickboxing Location" and they didn't rank for their own organisation term. They only ranked for their club name (if you could remember it).

    But one of their main competitors in the same city did rank because they had used the wordpress tag 'XYZ kickboxing' on their Wordpress site which means they got my click. Not the actual club I was looking for.

    Do they matter... there is an SEO benefit there.

    If that makes sense (I didn't want to mention real business names which makes it a little awkward explaining).
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  • Profile picture of the author Abledragon
    As both Martin and Big Al have said, tags are part of the WordPress filing system and, used properly, are good.

    What I have found, though, is that it's hard to use tags properly with a new site because your filing system evolves over time and, initially, you may have tags with only one article in them.

    So I tend not to use tags initially. Then, as the articles on the site build up, I review the articles within each category to see if they can be sub-divided into closer groupings and, if so, create tags to do that.

    This article goes into tags and categories in a bit more detail, including how I set up the SEO:

    Optimise WordPress with Categories and Tags

    Cheers,

    Martin.
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  • Profile picture of the author WillR
    If you use Categories and sub categories properly then there should be no need for tags. Categories and sub categories are for search engines, tags are for users.

    Search engines are going to pay less attention to tags because they are much more easily manipulated. You can easily put incorrect tags on a post to try and fool the search engines (and they know this) but it's going to be much more obvious if you tried to mis-categorize a post and thus the search engines would pay more attention to categories.
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