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A beginner's guide to tags
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What are tags? Why are they important? This guide is all about tags.By definition
Tags are keywords - words or phrases that you search for. The tags on my posts are listed at the end of each page, just before the comments. For this post, I've copied the tags below so you can see what they are.tags, keywords, search engines, categorisation, organisation, navigation
So if you searched my site for "navigation", this is one of the posts that would come up.
Tags have their uses
Searching is the fundamental principle behind tags, but that doesn't mean you can only search by typing a word into a box and clicking "search".On the right-hand side of my posts, you'll see "content with similar tags". This takes the tags on a post and compares it to other posts with the same tags. Posts that share a lot of the same tags will be shown high on this list, allowing you to easily find other content that might be of interest. This is a really handy way to delve deeper into a large site.
Also, if you view a post and look at the tags, you'll see they are links. Clicking on one of the tags will display other posts with that tag.
Furthermore, there's the Tag Map. This displays a chart of all the tags on a site, though on large sites it will only show a subset. On my site, you'll only see the tags that have been used on 2 or more posts. The bigger the tag, the more posts use it. You'll see that Entrecard is a big tag - clicking on that will show you all of my Entrecard posts.
Third party search engines
I've used "third party" because I'm trying to make the distinction between a search link that only searches the content on your site, and a search engine like Google that searches lots of sites, not just yours.Let's start by looking at one of my other posts: Advertising: don't put all your eggs in one basket?
As usual, the tags appear at the end of the post. However, most search engines will just see these tags as part of the content - they won't interpret them as keywords that people could search for to find that page.
Search engines need to be told about keywords in a different way. This is done with something called <meta> tags. Here's the code that is used for the above post:
<meta name="keywords" content="advertising, entrecard, quality traffic, statistics, referrals" />
Don't worry, I'm not expecting you to add this code to your articles manually - most blogging and website software will do this for you. It's just to give you a bit of background.
"Meta" basically means data, or information. name="keywords" is used to tell search engines that you're giving them a list of keywords. content="..." is where the actual keywords go.
Not all search engines look at this information, but as some do, I think it's worth including it.
The importance of accurate tags
The thing about tags is that you enter them yourself, so if you don't include "good" tags, it'll be harder for people to find your posts. Take some time to ensure you enter some useful tags that will help people to find your posts in future.What do you think?
Do you use tags on your posts?Do you understand more about them now?
Do you see why it's important to have good tags?
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Comments on A beginner's guide to tags
Ok, so what's the difference between tags and categories?
Never really worried too much about tags per se, however I do use the categories like most others
I must admit that a huge cloud of tags annoys me. But I think it's pretty useful to use tags like you did, after each post. How do you do that? Do you use a plugin?
Monique - glad you found it useful.
anonymum - categories are used for organising your content. Tags are similar, but with a list of "related content", tags can highlight posts in other categories that might be of interest. Also, I don't think that categories are used by search engines.
I think you'd usually have more tags on a post than the number of categories. Typically you'd only put a post in one or two categories, otherwise you can get a long list of categories. I think that in WordPress, categories must be created in the admin screens, but tags can be entered whether they have been used before or not.
Diana - it's a feature that's built into the system I use - Majestic. It doesn't even require a plugin. I don't know how you'd do it in WordPress. I'm sure it's possible, but not sure how.
Thanks for the comments. :)
Thank you for this piece of useful information. I used to mix up tag with category. Reading this made me realise how important tag is.
Hi symphonyoflove, thanks for the comment. Glad you found it useful. :)
Tags are on by default in WordPress 2.3.3. So you can enter tags right on the post editing screen. It's entered in comma-delimited format, so as an example, you'd have 3 tags for "tips, big breakfast, schooling".
If you're still on an earlier version of WordPress, you might find the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin useful.
Thanks for the info, Vincent. :)
This post was very informative. I used to ignore the tag line because I found it annoying but recently I have started using them more. It's good to know why they are important.