Tags in wordpress -Important?

[PedroM]

Hello,

I use the Wordpress plataform in my blog. What I want to ask is, how important is the tag field in the posts area.

Since I have the title tag and meta description how important is that field?

Its really a question that was in my mind since I start doing SEO

Tks in advance guys

[JGar-28032]

Hey Pedro,

This really depends on what you want to do with your site, and how you want to deliver the content to your readers.

The tags are generally used to help people find articles that interest them (by searching or clicking the tags, etc.) so they are an important usability feature for a lot of blogs. But they can create a bit of duplicate content if they are allowed to run rampant.

Because you can place tags with more/less specificity, you can give a much better description to each post. So if your site is about "SEO" you may have a post that goes into the "beginning SEO" category. But the post is about title tags. So you would give that post the tags of "title tags, meta tags, on-page seo" etc.  depending on how your site is organized.

So you see how they allow you to place just a bit more info so you can tell your visitors what the post is all about.

The reason you hear about them so much in the SEO arena is due to their ability to grossly inflate the number of your pages on your site with content that is duplicated elsewhere.

If you have that same post and tagged the way I described, you now have the same/very similar content on the archive pages for each of the tags you assigned to it. This is usually handled by either blocking the search engines from indexing those pages, or creating canonical pages appropriately.

There's a really good plugin to make this a non-issue by Joost de Valk, but before you download and start setting it up, you might want to also read his WP SEO article.

The Article:

http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

The Plugin:

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

[legalseo]

I've been curious about this question myself and your post prompted me to do a little research. I'm not sure I've reached a ironclad conclusion yet but here's a little of what I found. First there are mixed opinions about the value. A SEO for WordPress presentation @ San Francisco in 2011 by Sujan Patel indicated that using tags weren't worth the potential broken link and duplicate content hassles (see slide 15 of his PPT).

In another opinion I came across, "attaching tags to each content asset, article or post does very little for the SEO (search engine optimization) of any singular article on a B2B blog or website. Used properly, however, content tagging makes your blog or website much better.

The author goes on to say "the SEO value of tags (as well as categories) is not in the association of keywords with a particular article or content asset (as many believe), but instead in the aggregated content that appears on the tag/category page that most CMS platforms generate automatically."

A third article flatly stated "Tags add specificity to your blog posts that help both search engines and visitors find relevant information on your webpage." My takeaway is tags are good for the user if used relevantly and not gratuitously (e.g. keyword stuffing). That seems to mesh with Google's mantra about writing for the user.

[PedroM]

Well tks for the aswers guys.

I reach to the conclusion that those tags are not a huge important factor for SEO. I will remove them since I have no porpuses for them in my website

Tks for the help guys