Tagging posts properly for users and SEO

August 15. 2020

With such a huge number of blogs out there, standing out in the crowd is a difficult task. Bloggers fight the neverending battle of converting visitors into regular readers. With high stakes and fierce competition, even the slightest improvement of your blog pages will play a crucial role. With that in mind, I wish to talk about the importance of tagging posts properly for users and SEO. No matter how good your content is, in the end, Google decides how to rank your pages. If you are not visible enough, your content will suffer.

Why are blogs and post tags important?

The best way to treat post tags is to look at them as categories for your content. Every blog has hundreds of articles, but they all belong to specific categories. For example, you may have sections for health articles, IT, workout, etc. Post tags help you sort your articles and make sure they are “attached” to the correct category.

Just how your blog’s headings and subheadings affect SEO, the same happens with post tags. Each post tag creates a new indexable and rankable page for your website. The more pages you have, the more points you can collect, and rank your website higher.

The dos and don’ts of tagging posts properly for users and SEO

Well, if adding tags to posts means I get new indexable and rankable pages, and leads customers to my articles, I can add as many tags as I want, right?

This might be a logical question to follow. However, let’s not jump ahead to conclusions, and talk about the correct process of tagging posts properly for users and SEO.

As I said, all post tags you add to your articles generate new pages for your website. Consequently, that changes how your sitemap looks. Even though submitting a sitemap to Google’s search console is a good strategy, you should not use post tags lightly and ass as many as you’d like.

Having a messy sitemap will result in a confusing website for your readers. With that in mind:

• never tag posts with tags that do not belong to that category. If there is no direct link with the tag and the post, your users will get confused. Even worse, they will get content that has no value to them.
• do not overcrowd your posts with tags. Even if all of the tags might have a connection to the article, the best is to tag the post with 2 or 3 keywords. Anything more than that is not considered a good practice. The goal is not to have one article in all of your categories, but to have a variety of content. The only exception would be cornerstone articles.
• do not make up tags the way you see fit. Tags should be concentrated groups of words that people are more likely to search.

Now that I have outlined steps that you should avoid, let’s talk about how tagging posts properly for users and SEO should be done.

Choose your tags wisely

First and foremost, know how to pick the best tags for your posts. As I mentioned above, think about the words people would most likely search. A good approach is to track link clicks and button clicks in WordPress. If you know what your readers like to visit the most, you will be able to narrow down categories and properly sort your posts.

Once you have narrowed down the possibilities, think about the best keywords. White word best describes the group of posts you wish to tag? You have to think of a word that will most likely describe the majority of the articles on the page. Picking a word that goes great with two or three posts, but is simply ok with the rest is not gonna cut it. Another good practice is to always reconsider the keyword you decided upon. To explain this in a colorful way let me quote Emanuel Lasker, a former German World Chess Champion:

“When you see a good move, look for a better one.”

This statement is so simple but true, and it can be applied to anything in life. If you think you have a good keyword for your tag, look for a better one.

Optimize tags for SEO purposes

When tagging posts, you might be accidentally creating a mess without knowing it. The best way to explain this is with an example. Besides tagging posts, remember that every post has its own keywords, that are also treated as article tags. If we say that you own a company that sells organic food, you should know that all the pages you write in your blog will “compete” for the term “organic food”. If you optimize pages in such a way that they represent a specific brand, your pages can rank for the tag “organic food”, while individual products can rank for their own tags.

The goal is to stop pages from competing for one against the other in terms of ranking on your website.

A good idea is to look into useful WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO.

Advantages of post tagging

One of the biggest advantages of tagging posts properly for users and SEO is that you make it easy for readers to find what they are looking for. If you want to keep a reader on your website, help him find related content of interest with ease.

With that in mind, one of the best practices is to regular maintenance of your website’s structure. When you find a good tag, that does not mean you are set for life with it. After some time you might wish to change some tags, remove the redundant ones, and keep everything fresh.

Keep it simple and focus on what is important

Hopefully, this short guide about tagging posts properly for users and SEO helped you understand why this is such an important process. Furthermore, I hope that you now understand how to do it properly. With that in mind, put some time and effort into it. Consequently, you will substantially improve your website, and keep your customers satisfied!