How does tags work in wordpress

We currently have 26 categories. Will this practice hurt us from an SEO standpoint? Should we use the old drop down menu instead? You can use your categories and link to all 26 or even more. It may leak your home page link juice but will improve your category page SEO. Can you help me? So for this particular blog post I put nutrition as the category and for the tags I put protein, carbohydrates, post workout.

Would you do the same? Tom, Nice article. I think I understood. I am not a geek or a techie, we have to remember that the bulk of people writing blogs are chatting about their latest gourmet dining experience, new baby or knitting patterns. Thanks for your thoughts Kathleen. There definitely is a wide array of bloggers out there. If you have specific questions about this post I would be happy to answer them! Optimizing taxonomy refers to making a group of terms as functional and effective as possible.

Hello Tom! My blog covers a year after losing Mom. As it rolled along, it became fun, wacky and positive as opposed to sort of grief management. After three months I do want to use categories and tags in an effective way. In the simplest form, would my categories all be something like MOM and tags that are the basic subject of each post? Good example with Chicken Recipe since we do have that tag to consider and thinking of reducing the amount of tags.

I feel now like I have been using tags for no reason and every post has a different tags that just have a relation to what they are about… I am going to cut back on the tags and try to merge them a little bit, thanks! So what category is this article under? This is definitely a case of do as I say but not as I do! Great article.. For example using Moz Analytics for my site.. Great article, very helpful.

Do I have to program code into each individual blog page? Into the WP Editor? Check a box in the WP Admin? Where and how to activate tag visibility? Thanks —. Once I do and delete A, will it create any duplication problem, errors or anything else unknown? Please guide. BTW, can you please update the screenshots? I see new additions by Yoast on the tabs specified here.

Google we de-index the now non-existent pages and reindex accordingly. And blogger have not such option of category. Thank you so much Tom Ewer.

Great post Tom. But you have shown the right way to use it. Great article, thank you! I have always used catagories pretty well, but this will certainly help me do an even better job. I needed a better understanding of how catageories and tags differ and now I have that. Thanks again. Plus you integrated the Yoast WordPress Plugin, and showed us how to properly set it up!

Thanks, and Happy New Year! I have not been using tags because I really did not understand exactly what they where for.

A lot of other pages I have read on this scare me away with the duplicate content issue. Now I see they can actually be beneficial for me especially with the type of site I have.

Its really easy to make and i like this configuration, due to help google to find you without over optimization. Very useful information, thanks. I recently submitted a question to the support forum but seems nobody responded it. Basically I am finding some difficulties to configure the meta descriptions and title for the custom post type page displaying all the custom post type posts. I have a new WP website and am afraid to click on the Plugin updates? My fear is that something will drastically change my site.

Is this a legitimate fear? I finally could find the way to troubleshoot the issue. I have updated the thread in the WordPress. Great to read you got the problem sorted and thanks for coming back to let us know about the solution Julian!

Thanks for the great article. I just set everything accordingly. Hope for more visitors now. Ooops, I got wrong way in tagging my posts.

Thanks for the tips, Mate. Really that sums up in that line where it says what has been enumerated below, very apt way of putting across! Good article, but there is no mention either here or in the help tab of what any of the taxonomy variables do. Tons of Google searches, too. I found an answer to my own question. This is good stuff, thanks.

I got to this post because I just saw in Google Webmaster Tools that I have duplicate title tags for my blog roll. Hopefully I fixed this by clicking no index of subpages of archives. How do I get these codes that you place in the title template? I have no idea what that stuff means, or where to find it, or how to write it. The nature of my site means this may be useful because my tags are normally iPhone apps and so inappropriate linking is unlikely.

This article gives me more confidence that this could be a good idea. You say that categories are like the table of content and tags are like the index.

Does that mean you would advocate having identical keywords and tags. For example, if you had a marathon and a shoe category. Thank you for this article. Hi Tom really great post.

Usually i use two categories and several tags for a single post. Both identical content. Blogs, forums, and related systems often show the same content in multiple formats. For example, a blog entry may appear on the home page of a blog, in an archive page, and in a page of other entries with the same label. Do you understand this? We both know that a category page and a homepage of a blog are usefull for the user, and should be indexed by Google… so totally normal that an individual blogpost excerpt or full is available on those pages.

So why do they mention this. The page still excist, people can view it and people can link to it…. That you mention noindex when discussing duplicate content, is not clear to me. A better choice to prevent duplicate issues would be a redirect…. Too many is not good for doing seo, is it? Hello Tom I was totally confused between tags and categories but you article answer all my question. Its really a great article with lot of knowledge. Between i want to know how much tags should we use for a each post to index it well.

Is it Black Head Technique! Hello and thanks for this great info. I am not understanding how to set title templates in the taxonomies. I am confused on this part completely. You explained this topic exceptionally well and have truly clarified this topic for me.

Thanks so much and I look forward to coming back!! Dear Tom Ewer; I want to thank you very much, this great for me and my website, It is not best but too much batter way to increase traffic. Thank you very much because I am finding to sol this problems from 2 months. Now I am feeling relax. Thank you for the post, Tom. This is by far the best web page that explains about how to use category and tag. Before reading this I thought category and tag are like keywords. You show me that that is not the case.

Hi Tom, thanks for this useful article- as a rookie, I was doing the haphazardly tagging thing although not to the point of choco-goodness ;. My bad! Okay, so I always pretty much used tags. And yes, when I look at my analytics it seems like there is indeed higher engagement. What I really wonder about, is about the tag cloud.

Is it useful to put it somewhere on your page? So, I want to try and be sure on this. And of course many more things could be used like that. But this means that every post done in this manner will have quite a few links going back to tag pages 1 link per tag per post at most.

As long as you are tagging conscientiously it sounds to me that these links would provide value to the end user. I see no reason why Google would penalise you for that. He ran some SEO tool, the name of which escapes me now, and after a week pulled up a great long report basically saying I was knee deep in duplicate content.

Anyway to cut a long story short it seemed that WordPress was generating a unique URL for every tag and ever time I published in more than one category. I spent a couple of days stripping them all out and after I did watched the site climb back up the rankings again.

Could it be my theme that is quirky and confusing Google, I use Atahualpa? The first thing I would say is that if something has worked for you, rely on your own personal experience! Having said that, I am adamant that using tags responsibly and having them indexed by Google should have no adverse impact on your rankings. There could be a thousands reasons why Google was unhappy with your site and correlation does of course not necessarily lead to causation. Thanks a lot for taking the time to respond Tom, much appreciated and your advice is taken on board!

Do I need to display the tag under post? Manik, you need to display the tags under your posts. Excellent information about categories and tags,this useful info. Excellent post. I was a chronic over tagger and I have recently no indexed and no followed all my tags one one of my sites. My rankings for my posts themselves do seem to have improved but my traffic levels have crashed as my tags were generating lots of traffic. I was wondering, if do index but no follow makes more sense in terms of retaining link juice to the main pages, or are you then just penalizing the tag pages instead of the posts?

I think your assumption is right. My email seems to have replaced my name on that last comment by the way, be grateful if you could remove it. Do have a question. What is the benefit of naming categories? I imagine it would pull the first blog entry associated with that category?

Using your example:. Google pulls what it deems to be relevant content from the site and displays it in the meta description. The article from Google, which you are refering to, are dated in Does the recent Panda updates changed anything regarding this?

Thanks for this post. I have always, and accidentally used way to many tags. Thanks Tom! Thank you Tom! That was more than I expected. I never thought of linking to my categories or tags. I will use that. Do categories and tag metas need to be visually displayed via blog posts for search engines to sniff out? I purposely hide my category metas on blog posts and only display tag metas to keep the posts nice and clean.

Does this mean I have unlikely chance of search engine robots not picking up my content or can search engines still see the meta tags and categories behind the scene? It would be helpful to have them linked to from somewhere though.

However, the very existence of the pages is helpful in itself. Tom, do you think that now its importante put the name of the site each time in each post, I think that its like lots optimitation for the site. This really makes a lot of sense. I use All in one seo and i customized my tag name and slug for seo propose and i get excellent result!

Tq for the tips. Before this i was crazy on linking and tagging. Your advice on tagggin and yoast plugin sure help me much.. I used to probably over tag a bit, but I pulled back on that. I even find that many tags out rank the posts in search engines. What about a post about this? Very interesting stuff. My website Administrator edit: link removed needs a lot of your tips.

Enjoyed reading this one Tom — flowed very easilly. Categories and tags have always baffled me. I use categories, but have never used tags. Thanks for this post it will help a lot, my blog is almost 4 years old and my tags and categories are a complete mess.

Which will have better conversion…. They keep changing…I mean pages.. So there will be Keyword dance depending upon Keyword density and other on Page factors.. One easy way to make most out of: Create a resource list page.. For example, ways to manage WordPress site.. You can have ratio of where first 50 links are from your site and rest 50 are the best of link from web… This way you will get benefit of outbound link SEO…. Do let me know if you still see that link as broken..

What message you getting? For instance, I quite like category pages with introductory text, which I suppose is a sort of hybrid of the two. Also, resource pages require ongoing upkeep, whilst category pages are updated automatically with fresh content, which Google loves.

I am really happy to see your comment and getting idea over resource list page. So you are using category and tag along with resouce list pages or just resource list pages? Hello Harsh and Tom, can you please explain in more details what do you call the resource pages? Is it the page which is filtered by the category and tag together?

Is it possible somehow to make google indexing such pages? Maybe there is a way to write meta titles, descriptions and keywords for such pages? I think the tags are not necessary some of them tell that using the tags will penalize the site is it true?

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Wrapping Up If you take the time to create and maintain a limited set of highly relevant categories and tags, you will see benefits in time. You may also like Subscribe to our newsletter! Great stories straight into your inbox. Thanks for informative post 3 years ago Reply. Carl Robinson Really useful stuff, thanks very much.

Steve Can you duplicate a product category and say a custom post type category? Will there be a part 2? Raj How many Tags are enough to a single post, can you please tell me? Mikhail Nasa Sometimes I find my colleague stuffing tags on a post, or even rewrite the title post on a tag. Rehan I made the same mistake Several Times. Nirjon Rahman What are the best practices for writing Page titles for category archives 4 years ago Reply. Viraj Shah Even I have the same query. Scott Is this article still relevant in ?

Appliance Nice guide, It will surely help. Thank you!! Confidence Post Wow.. I have been looking for a much more clearer explanation about Wp categories and tags for seo… Thanks again 5 years ago Reply. Grow Pinterest Followers Very good post. I absolutely appreciate this site. Thanks a lot 5 years ago Reply. Where can I find out more? But after reading your article i should try tag for my wordpress website 5 years ago Reply.

Chris Gongsun Very useful advice. Cassio Murilo Good job! I think of tags like ecommerce, product and color. Ex: chair, black Category — chair Tag — black Or product and size or other feature. But color, size and other features can also be subcategories.

What do you think? Rajesh kanyal Hi, Thanks for this post it will help me and my blog a lot. Thank you very much 5 years ago Reply. Think of them as keywords used for topics discussed in a particular post. In WordPress, if a user does not select a category for a post, then it is automatically filed into the default category. However, tags are not automatically added to a post unless a user adds them, which makes them completely optional, but there is not limit as to how many you can add.

When a visitor clicks on a tag they are taken to the archive page where all the posts with that tag are listed. Tags can also be displayed in one of the sidebars using a widget. Believe it or not, but knowing how to make a website from scratch is one of the more essential skills you should master as a small business owner in this day and age. Please bear with me! The web host you choose to power your WordPress site plays a key role in its speed and performance.

However, with so many claiming to offer the fastest WordPress hosting out there, how do you decide which company to use? In addition to performance, This is a great idea if you want a development site that can be used for testing or other purposes. XAMPP lets you run a website from your very own computer. And once you Categories and Tags in WordPress? Themeisle content is free. When you purchase through referral links on our site, we earn a commission. Learn More.

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