The Right Way to Tag Your Blog Posts.

 It’s easy to overlook the humble post tag when you’re setting up your blog.

But tags are worth a second look and then some. These little labels can deliver a lot of value when you know what they do and how to use them wisely.

Tags on your blog posts can make it easier for readers to find what they’re looking for.

They can help search engine crawlers understand the content that’s on your site.

And tags can help you organize, update, and repackage your archived posts. With the right tracking tools, your tags can even show you which direction your new content should take.

What a Blog Post Tag Is—and Isn’t

Tags are similar to a lot of other site elements, and it can get confusing. Let’s start by clearing up what a tag is and is not.

First, blog post tags are not hashtags. They have similar functions, but hashtags work across an entire platform, which is why you get results from about a million different accounts when you search for #puppies on Instagram. Post tags work within your site, so clicking the puppies tag will return only your posts about wee puppers.

Post tags also aren’t the code snippets used to track marketing campaigns with Google Tag Manager. Two totally different things.

Post Tags Complement Categories

Tags are optional, but WordPress automatically sorts blog posts into categories. If you don’t set up your own categories and use them, your content will be “uncategorized.”

That’s not helpful for your readers, you, search crawlers, or people using search engines to find the topics you write about. So please, use your categories.

Some bloggers don’t tag their posts because they feel like categories take care of all their sorting needs. That can work if you have a small blog that you don’t update that often, but the more content you have, and the more varied your topics are, the more useful tags will be.

Here’s why: Categories sort your posts into a top-level groups that provide a general outline of your content. For example, baking blog categories might be cakes, pies, cookies, and brownies.

But you can tag posts in any of those categories with specific labels like Christmas, gluten-free, and so on, so readers can find all your Christmas or gluten free recipes in one tag search.

Thanks....