Importance of Tags

[orion_joel]

A real quick question, what is the benefit in properly setting up tags for each of the posts on my blogs?

Is it something that i should be really looking at, or something that is only a marginal benefit?

[vangogh]

Funny you ask since I've recently come across a post aimed at explaining categories and tags.

Tags are just another way to describe your content. They become another way to search for your content.

Say you wrote a post about SEO. You describe the basics and have a section about keywords and one about links. You have sections about copywriting and site development and maybe one on analytics. So how do you categorize that post? Depends on the categories you have set up on your blog. Odds are the post would end up in a general SEO category, but it might still be useful to someone who's only interested in researching keywords.

By tagging that same post with keyword research, link building, copywriting, etc. you allow that content to be grouped under those tags instead of just the category.

Do you have to use tags? Not at all. Whether you use them will probably depend on how you've organized your content. One thing to consider though is that each post should be in one and only one category. That same post can be tagged in as many ways as you'd like. Another consideration is that if you do categorize and tag a post it's likely accessible with two different URLs, one with the category name and one with the tag name used to find it. Odds are you'll want to keep spiders from crawling and indexing the tag versions of the page.

[KristineS]

I use tags on the blogs I write and I think it does help the search engines index them. I know the EnMart blog shows up under some keywords that I don't use as categories, but often use as tags. So, in my opinion, they are useful.

[vangogh]

You could be creating duplicate content of the same post is accessible as:

domain.com/category/post
domain.com/tag/post

You may end up with posts ranking for keywords used as tags, but it's also possible that overall the site could pull more search traffic without the duplicate content. It depends on how the site is set up. Everything may be fine as is, but see if you can access the same post with different URLs and see if the different URLs are indexed.