Are you confused with WordPress tags and categories?
When starting a WordPress site as beginner, you might often get confused since there is a big misconception with WordPress tags.
Do WordPress tags help SEO or it's a myth?
Let's find out with us in this guide.
What are WordPress tags?
WordPress tags are the best tool to organize the content over your blog based on similar topics.
Usually, tags are located within the blog post, in the block editor, you may find them in the sidebar.
With these tags' help, you can group the blog post that has the same category or subcategory.
WordPress tags play an essential role in structuring the content over a big website with tons of blogs on different topics.
Tags are the best way to organize your site's content and enable visitors to find all post related to a single subtopic topic.
Do WordPress tags help SEO?
WordPress has an option to use tags and categories to organize the content on your site.
Tags and categories both serve the same purpose, and the only difference is categories are vast, and the tags are small.
Categories are hierarchy, they may have subtopics and tag are smaller, but they are standalone.
Both are used to organize the content on your site and make it easy for visitors to navigate your site; it creates a better site structure.
Both allow a user to find the content based on categories, but there is a big misconception with how WordPress SEO tags are related to SEO.
Are WordPress tags important for SEO?
Some users use too many tags for all the post, and they think it's better for SEO because some fake SEO gurus advise them to do, but the reality is WordPress tags doesn't help in SEO. They only exist to organize the content on your site.
Overusing WordPress tags is harmful. When a user clicks on your tags and finds nothing except the single post, it can create a poor user experience for your visitors, impacting your SEO ranking.
It is a big misconception that people use tags to targeted keywords, but they have nothing to do with SEO ranking.
When you create a tag, WordPress automatically create the archive page for that tag. Using too many tags mean more archive pages on your site, and Google considers it as low-quality pages or thin content on your site, which can also hurt your SEO ranking.
If you want to learn more about SEO, check our SEO category.
Also Read: Toolspur Review – Best group buy SEO tools
Categories vs Tags
WordPress tags and categories both have the same purpose; they both classify the content of your blog.
But there are some differences between them; we will compare both tags and categories in different aspects.
1# Tags are short, and categories are broad
Categories include the broad topic of posts on your blog, and tags specify the concise subject.
For example, if you have a food blog so the food news, recipes and cooking tips are the categories for topics, and if you have an article with the name of 5 best tips to cook Turkish chicken then there might be two tags, “Turkish”, and “chicken.”
Note – It's not fair to create categories for these topics like Turkish and chicken until you decide to share a lot of content about these topics.
2# Optional and necessary
The next difference between WordPress tags and categories is how necessary they are.
It's essential to have at least one category for your every blog if it won't have any category then WordPress will automatically assign it uncategorized default category.
If you have lots of uncategorized posts on your blog, it will be hard for users to find the content they are looking. Your blogs must have proper categories.
But having tags are optional, you should not include them in every single post until it's essential.
For example –
If you have a post “6 best way to create backlinks” it must come under the ‘SEO' category. It will be easy for a user to find it, and it will also guide the search engine crawlers to index and crawl your post since the crawlers navigate your blog through the categories and menus.
You can also have a tag for this post as “backlinks” so when the visitors click on this tag, they will get redirected to this tag to find all the post related to backlinks tag.
How to avoid WordPress tag-related SEO issues
When tags and categories are both used together, they interpret each other, which might negatively impact your SEO. Your site may suffer from duplicate pages and thin content issue.
To avoid WordPress tag related SEO issue, I will show their different tips. Following these tips will allow you to avoid wrong SEO approach and improve your site's overall user experience.
1# Distinguish between categories and tags
When creating the categories and tags, make sure you don't assign the same words for both.
If you have a category name of a recipe, then you don't need to use the same keyword for tags.
However, you can use tags to differentiate to smaller categories of under the main category. You can write “breakfast recipes” as the tags so that interested users can find all the posts related to breakfast recipes under that section.
Following this system will allow you to create a better user experience and save your site for having duplicate pages and thin content.
2# No index your tag archives
Enabling no index option for all your tags is the best ideas to avoid negative SEO impact.
You can use free SEO plugins Rank Math to enable your tags' no-index option.
After installing the plugin head over to the Rank Math dashboard and click on Titles & Meta > Golabl Meta and enable No index Empty Category
3# Only use tags if you need them
Tags help improve your site structure and allow users to navigate it more quickly, but you should not use too many tags as I told you they might hurt your SEO ranking.
Only use the tag when it's necessary.
Is targeting keywords in WordPress tags right for SEO?
When people use too many WordPress tags, they want to show the google that the content is related to a particular topic they wish to rank.
But the time had gone when google used to rank the content based on keywords stuffing, now the google is smart enough to identify your content based on its quality and relevancy.
Instead of following wrong seo advice and using too many WordPress tags for SEO, you should keep your fours on creating quality content.
Conclusion
Using WordPress tags helps organize your site's content and tell your users what you content is all about but you should not use too many of them as they may create poor site experience and create bad user experience that will hurt your SEO ranking.
Using tags strategically will create an outstanding user experience for the reader and save your site from negative SEO impact.
Is there anything else I have missed that you want me to include in this blog post? Tell me in the comment section.
