How To Add Tags To posts in WordPress
How To Add Tags To WordPress Posts: One of the main things you want to keep in mind when using a website or blog as a communication tool for your business, is to make sure that users can find what they are looking for on your site quickly and easily, and that search engines can find and index your pages for relevant searches and search results.
This is where Tags can help you. They can be useful for letting users find what they are looking for and for letting search engines know what your content is about.
In this how to add tags to WordPress Posts tutorial you are going to learn what they are, how they can help WordPress users, and how to use them in your posts to improve user experience and search engine indexing.
Watch the video below and then complete the step-by-step tutorial to learn more about using tags in your WordPress posts …
Tags – What Are They And How Can They Help You?
It’s a keyword that provides a useful reference for visitors and search engines. They are essentially words or short two to three word keyword phrases that help describe what your posts and pages are really about.
They are accurately representing your posts or pages can help to increase traffic by allowing search engines to gain a better understanding of how relevant your site is to specific topics, and assist visitors in navigating through your content to related topics on your site.
They also need to be used and managed correctly, however, as “over-tagging” posts and pages can dilute its effectiveness as a navigation and search engine indexing tool. Adding too many tags is the equivalent of “keyword-stuffing”, which search engines like Google not only frown upon, but have long been penalizing sites for.
How To Add Tags To posts in WordPress
Tags Vs Categories
They should not be confused with categories. They are similar to a Category, but it’s smaller in scope. While a post may be filed under a single category, it may be referenced using several tags.
A popular definition used by taxonomy experts to help people understand what tags are and how they differ from categories, is to think of categories as your site’s table of contents, and tags as your site’s index words.
An easier way to remember the difference is that the Categories of your posts won’t change often, but your Tags will probably change with every new Post you make.
A good example of this, which is often used to help users understand the difference, is to imagine that you own a recipes website. You could “categorize” your recipes by meal type (e.g. breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, etc) or by cuisine (e.g. Italian, Chinese, French, etc), which would help give your visitors a broad starting point for finding information on your site, and then use tags to help group your individual posts containing recipes along similar main ingredients (e.g. “chicken”, “fish”, “vegan”, “gluten-free”, etc).
This way, having a “chicken” or “chicken recipe” tag on chicken-based recipes linked to all other chicken recipe posts on your site, would be very helpful if your readers come across a great chicken dinner dish recipe on your site, and are then interested in finding more chicken recipes that you have published across different meal types or cuisines.
So, in the screenshot below taken from an actual WordPress-powered recipe blog found online, if you click on the “Chicken” tag at the end of one delicious chicken recipe …
You will be taken to a resource page on that blog listing all of their other chicken recipes …
The “chicken recipe” example above shows you how tags can be a useful navigation aid, and how they can also lead to increased engagement on your site, by making it easier for your site users or blog readers to locate the exact type of content that they are interested in.
How To Add Tags To posts in WordPress
When To Use Tags
Preferably, you should only use tags if you believe these will add value to your site’s navigation for users, or if you think it will help give search engines more “context” to work with when trying to determine how relevant the pages and posts of your site are to a specific topic.
If you already have a good navigation menu on your site, a list of categories on your sidebar and a search box prominently displayed, using tags may not be as important to your users in terms of navigation.
Keep in mind that there is no real downside to using tags if you choose your tags wisely, feel that it will benefit your users, and believe that it will have a positive impact on your search rankings.
They should be used sparingly and efficiently. Each tag you use should be short (no more than two or three words) and highly relevant to the content in your post.
Ideally, it’s recommended that you add no more than around five tags to your posts. Think about what the focus of your site is really all about, then think about the five keywords or keyword phrases that best describe what your post is about in the context of your site’s purpose and use these keywords as your tags.
Using the recipe blog from our previous example, you can see in the screenshot below that the blog owner has identified the five keywords that she believes best represents her post on “Southeast Asian Chicken Wings Recipe” and used these for contextually tagging her content …
Your tags should relate directly to the subject matter addressed in your post. Many SEO experts advise not to include keywords that appear in your content, but that are not relevant enough to warrant tagging.
Additionally, if a tag is only used a few times throughout your entire site’s body of content, there is little point in using it, as this indicates that the term is not particularly relevant to your site or blog as a whole. Likewise, if almost all of your posts use the same tag, then that particular tag is probably too general to be of any real value to users, as clicking on it will only bring up a list of posts that will probably comprise of almost your entire site.
When thinking about which tags to use, put yourself in the shoes of your ideal site visitor or blog reader and ask yourself for every tag you come up with if you would be compelled to click on it after coming to end of the post if you were interested in reading more about that topic on your site. If the answer is “yes” that is probably a useful tag to include. If not, don’t bother.
How To Add Tags To posts in WordPress: Step-By-Step Tutorial
To add tags to your posts, create a new post or edit an existing one, then locate the Tags Box in the sidebar section of your Create / Edit Post screen …
Note: If you can’t see the Tags box displayed in your screen, click on the Screen Options tab on the top right-hand corner of your screen …
And make sure that the “Tags” checkbox is ticked in the Show on screen section …
Enter your tag into the Tags box and click the Add button…
You can also add multiple tags to your post by typing or pasting them, separated with commas into the tag text field …
As you begin typing in your tag, an auto-complete list appears, allowing you to select from existing ones on your site to add to your post …
Additionally, you can click on Choose from the most used tags link and add them to your post by selecting them from the tag cloud that appears below the link…
To delete any unwanted ones, click on the little delete icon next to the tag…
You can also manage your post tags from the Quick Edit section of your Posts screen…
Once your post has been published or updated, your tags will display to visitors in a Tag Cloud in your sidebar (if you have configured your sidebar to display a Tag Cloud widget) …
“Tag clouds” may be configured in some themes to show how they are used throughout your blog in various sizes, colours, etc. This allows people to get a better perspective at a glance of what your site is really about…
Clicking on any Tag in the Tag Cloud …
Brings up a list of all posts that have been tagged with the same tag …
Editing WordPress Tags
If you are consistently posting content to your site using tags, you may end up with a bloated list after a while. If you need to edit or manage your tags, you can do so by going to Posts > Tags …
This will bring you to the Tags screen, which contains a list of all your tags and allows you to perform a number of management tasks, such as adding, editing and deleting single and multiple ones …
For more information about using the Tags screen, see this tutorial: How To Add, Edit And Delete Tags In WordPress
WordPress Plugins Related To Tags
There are a number of WordPress plugins that can help you when it comes to using and managing your WordPress Tags. For more details, see this tutorial: WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Tags
Congratulations! Now you know how to use tags in your WordPress posts.
WordPress is huge and can sometimes be overwhelming about where to start. As you move on to the next Page, you will have a clearer picture of where to start and progress to building a professional WordPress Site.
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