If you haven’t already, you should use tags on your WordPress site. They guide viewers to relevant content and push them to read all your website has to say about it. Additionally, tags aid search engines in determining your information arrangement.

This article will define WordPress tags, examine tag use advantages, and go through the distinctions between tags and categories. Additionally, we’ve covered how to generate tags, why you should restrict the number of tags you use, and how to show a tag cloud widget on your website.

Let’s discuss WordPress tags and the benefits of using them.

Exactly what do WordPress tags mean?

In WordPress, tags are evocative keywords you give to articles. It benefits website visitors in a few different ways. The tags we connect will be on the display when a post goes for the reader, often towards the bottom of the page or in a sidebar. The visitor may view all other posts associated with a certain tag by clicking one of the tags.

Tags also make it simple for readers to explore all of the subjects covered in your blog, which is another way they benefit you. A tag cloud, which is a collection of all the tags you create, may assist direct readers to subjects they show interest when it is prominently displays on your website.

The usage of tags is made simpler by WordPress, an excellent blogging platform, and there is a native tag cloud widget that is simple to set up. WordPress plugins also provide you with greater control over the positioning and formatting of your tags and tag cloud.

While using tags is all about keeping readers interested, it may also have an effect on SEO. In the next two parts, we’ll discuss what benefits employing tags may bring to your blog.

Should I Use Tags in WordPress?

A single post on your blog is likely to have piqued the curiosity of a new reader. After they’ve read your initial post, you want them to either read more on the same subject or look into a collection of similar topics. Tags may produce both of these outcomes.

A reader who clicks on a tag given to the article they just finished reading will learn more about a subject in which they are already interested. A reader who browses your tag cloud will get acquainted with the range of coverage provided by your site. The greatest strategies to engage new visitors who are unfamiliar with your material are to tag your articles and show a tag cloud.

Tags are also beneficial to your regular readers. People who read your blog frequently may be aware of all the themes you cover, but they’ll enjoy how simple it is to explore your site by subject thanks to tags.

Tags increase user experience, which is reason enough to utilise them, but they also have an influence on SEO. Let’s take a look at how tags might assist (or hurt) and how your blog entries rank in search results.

Are WordPress Tags Beneficial for SEO?

Tags may improve your SEO, but not in the way you think. A popular misconception is that search engines evaluate tags in the same way as they analyse keywords in your content, but this is not the case.

When a user searches for terms that exist in a post’s title, headers, or text, the post’s inclusion in the search results is affected. Tags have a different impact. Some of the same keywords may be applied to the article as tags, but since tags are unrelated to the content, search engines do not give them the same weight as in-content keywords and other forms of metadata.

So, how do tags aid SEO if search engines don’t regard them like keywords? Tags may help you rank higher in search results in two ways:

• Tags increase the user experience — Google analyses the quality of a website’s user experience by employing metrics related to the site’s organisation, ease of navigation, and length of stay. Tags entice people to investigate additional subjects and spend more time on your website.

• Tags assist web spiders in indexing your content – Google prefers sites that are well-organized and have a modest amount of categories and tags. Hierarchical category connections and a lean tag collection devoid of redundancy will aid search engines in indexing your material.
  When search engines examine your site for fresh material, they come across a current version of your sitemap, Categories page, and Tags page, all of which WordPress produces by default. The information in such files is used by search engine algorithms, along with other variables, to determine how effectively the material is arranged.

The high-value keywords you put in your titles and headers improve your search engine rating. Use of the same keywords as tags may make it more difficult for search engines to examine the structure of your website, causing your well-earned rating to plummet.

If your top keywords are the only terms that make sense to use as tags, you may do so, but your Tags page should be hidden from search engines. When search engines scan your site, the noindex WordPress tag advises them to disregard your Tags page. The Yoast SEO plugin or the noindex SEO plugin, both of which give a simple interface for omitting your Tags page from site crawling, are the simplest ways to do this.

To summarise, although tags have a significant influence on search results, their abuse may have a detrimental impact on how search engines perceive your site. The remainder of this post will provide advice on how to improve your usage of tags such that they benefit both your readers and your SEO.

WordPress Tags vs Categories: What’s the Difference?

Your articles are organised using tags and categories, with categories acting as high-level subject identifiers and tags expressing more specific aspects of the material. Tags are similar to a book’s index, while categories are similar to a table of contents.

WordPress uses categories by default; any post you don’t classify gets placed to the Uncategorized category by default. If your information is not classified, search engines will have a tougher difficulty scanning your website. Additionally, carefully organising your themes will benefit your site visitors.

You may characterise parent-child relationships in categories since they are hierarchical. You may make it easier for users to locate what they’re searching for by grouping your topics into categories and subcategories. Tags, on the other hand, are not connected to one another. They are perfect for emphasising significant keywords that are emblematic of your content but are too specialised to be utilised as categories.

How to Set WordPress Tags

Adding tags to both new and existing articles in WordPress is simple. The visual editor’s right-hand panel for new articles include a Tags box where you may input one or more tags. Use commas to separate several tags if you want to. You may browse, search, and filter all of the current tags, as well as create, amend, and remove them, by going to the admin dashboard and selecting Posts > Tags.

Although WordPress makes managing your tags simple, several plugins, like TaxoPress and Category Tag Pages, provide more extensive tag management features. Plugins in this category often enable users to design a custom appearance for their tag cloud to create an attractive display that encourages visitors to explore additional subjects in addition to offering more options to manage tags.

We briefly mentioned the influence of tag abuse on search engine rankings while addressing SEO. Overusing tags is one method to utilise them improperly. We’ll talk about how many tags are too many in the next section.

How Many Tags in WordPress Should You Use?

WordPress does not restrict the amount of tags you may use, but you should still use them judiciously.

While a limited number of tags is useful for visitors seeking for relevant material on your site, too many tags might lead readers astray. Most of the usefulness to the visitor is lost if the post has 10 tags, some of which hardly pertain to the core matter. As a result, tag assignments should be limited to the most important issues in the post and should not exceed five.

The overall number of tags you generate also has an effect. As we’ll see later, a tag cloud widget will show all of your tags, but if the reader has 100 tags to pick from, they may get overwhelmed. In terms of SEO, a simple category structure that is just one or two layers deep combined with a restricted tag collection that does not duplicate your categories makes it simpler for search engines to scan your site.

When designing categories, you should use the same simple approach to managing your tag collection. Limit the overall amount of tags and make sure that each tag is directly related to the post to which it is applied.

WordPress Tag Cloud Display Instructions

Displaying a tag cloud widget, which displays all of your tags in one spot, provides viewers with an appealing overview of your site’s content. Visitors may obtain an overview of your blog’s content in a single glance and simply jump into the topic that interests them the most.

You may put a tag cloud widget on your WordPress site by adding a Tag Cloud block to the block editor. The widget may show up to 100 of your tags, with the most frequently used tags displayed in bigger letter sizes. To add the block, click the Add Block Inserter button, search for “tag cloud,” and choose it. Settings enable you to customise how your tags look and how many tags are shown in the tag cloud.

There are a plethora of tag cloud plugins available to offer you greater control. Ultimate Tag Cloud Widget, for example, has sophisticated tag management tools that allow you to add or omit tags, as well as sorting, colouring, and stylistic options to make your tag cloud stand out.

A Final Word About WordPress Tags

A visitor may come to your site, read the article that brought them there, then click a tag at the bottom of the piece, read that article, and so on until they’ve read five or six of your postings. That instance alone demonstrates the versatility of WordPress tags. Consider the increased engagement that may occur when the same visitor sees your tag cloud widget and gets aware of the breadth of your blog.

WordPress tags, without a doubt, assist your blog readers locate similar topics and tempt them to explore your site’s material, but tags may also help search engines analyse your content arrangement, therefore enhancing your SEO. However, in practise, the most significant tag-related SEO aspect is preventing the negative effect of tag overuse.

We hope you found this look into WordPress tags useful. You’ll delight visitors and keep your articles at the top of search results if you develop and assign tags with your readers in mind, and manage your tag collection with SEO.

We now understand how Tags and Categories bloggers utilise to improve SEO. Now, choose Hostnats as your web hosting company and enjoy the services. Be happy that your blog content ranking well in search engines.