Tags are used to describe what the post or page is about. WordPress creates a page for every tag you use, when an user goes to a tag page he will see all articles that contain that tag. It is something like keywords. Remember one thing that there is the more powerful and underutilized tools of a blog or website is the ability to tag posts and pages. In this tutorial there is showing to you some tactics on how you can improve this targeting using tags.

First we need to take a step back and understand that there are several ways you can arrange your website/blog. The first is by subject, which most blog and CMS platforms call “categories.” The second is by date, which occurs as most blog/cms systems put things in year, month, and date groupings. A third is by tagging, which consists of the notes or descriptions you put on your posts or pages.

OK now that we’ve got the duplicate content issue resolved, why would anyone want to use tags in the first place? Can’t you achieve the same results with categories? Yes and no. Here’s an example of how I would use categories and tags: let’s say you have a celebrity website with categories like “baby bump,” “fashion,” “news,” “rumors,” etc. You are also going to have celebrities who are always in the news like Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. What I would do is create tags for each celebrity and, whenever I did a post about the celebrity, I’d tag it with his or her name.

Another example. You have a travel website with categories like “adventure travel,” “family travel,” “skiing,” “cruises,” and so on. I would set up tags for countries, states, or cities, like Bahamas, France, or Colorado. You could have a white water rafting page in the adventure travel category tagged with Colorado. You could have a Skiing in Vail post in the skiing category also tagged with Colorado. You can also have a family travel article about visiting the Museum of Science and nature and Botanic Gardens in Colorado. Those three separate articles would be interconnected by using the Colorado tag.

Here’s where the magic of tagging comes into play. If you use the cross linker plugin, you can set it up to automagically link any word like “Colorado” to the tag page for Colorado. So if the person reading any of the three Colorado articles clicks on “Colorado,” they visit the tag page and see all of your posts about Colorado. You will find that in-posts links get much higher click throughs than “tag” links at the end of an article. You could set it up the same way for Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, or any other word/tag you used. What this does is create an alternate navigation path that’s both really useful for readers and keeps your content exposed to the search engine spiders.

If you use very descriptive categories for your blog, you can still take advantage of using tags. For example a visitor reads one of your posts, he likes it and he want to read more about that subject, at the end of you post you have related articles shown, but if you follow a link from related articles, you read that post but the related articles in the next post are the same as the first article. So can read max 6 articles on a subject using related links navigation. Maybe someone want to read everything about a subject, but he find out that in a category listing page he got more messages than he wants and he will like to have a filter. Adding tags to your articles you can tell to your visitors how an article is related to the other, which tags they have in common. At the end of an article he can decide what topic he want to read more.

The good aspect of tags is that you can display them in different ways. You show tags under an article, you can have a menu list with most used tags on your blog, but the best way that i recommend is to use a tag cloud.

The advantage of a tag cloud is that your visitors can see what your articles are focused on, or what subjects do you approach. It can also work as a filter, go to a tag link so he can read only articles about that thread.

Some important tips which is useful and need to remember:

By using tags you can provide a more granular way to break down the content on your website.
This break down can provide alternate navigation paths to your content for both humans and search engines.
This break down becomes more useful to humans if you link words/tags within the main body of the content.
This break down is extremely effective for serving very targeted advertising or affiliate links.
Care should be taken to minimize duplicate content and duplicate/similar tags

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