Are tags important for SEO?

[dealblogger]

I just installed a plugin called SEO content control and it is telling me I need to write descriptions for my tags. I haven't been using tags although I did create a list of them. I don't have an endless amount of time on my hands so is this a worthwhile task?

[AubbiefromAubenRealty]

No, the descriptive tags helped my blog posts get noticed and it better optimized my post for the search engines. I know that it is a pain starting out but I can say that I could tell a difference in the posts that had tags and the posts that did not.

[dealblogger]

Interesting. So how are tags different than categories? I already categorize all my posts and they're usually in several categories. I have category pages noindexed which was advised here on this forum.

[AubbiefromAubenRealty]

Categories help your posts get found  within a website while the tags help your post get found on the search engines. My assumption is that you are using WordPress. ( For example: I run a blog on real estate investing. There are several categories to choose from inside of the WordPress website.I want people who are highly interested in reading about the niche subject of real estate investing to read my post so, I type in the categories, " investing" " real estate." This helps the visitors who are apart of the WordPress community and are interested in real estate investing find my blog. What the tags do is help people who go to Google and type in " real estate investing blogs" find my blog.  This is the difference as I understand it.  The good thing is that you will only have to type your tags once. Once they are in the system, it just a matter typing a few letters before it pops up.

[dealblogger]

Ah. I had no idea tags helped with search engines. Thanks!

[ThompsonPaul]

I'm going to have to offer a different opinion than Chad, njam. There's nothing about tags that is intrinsically beneficial for SEO, and in fact misusing them can cause considerable SEO problems.

Bottom line, the primary purpose of tags is as an additional navigation tool for your visitors, and must be carefully implemented so not to damage your site's SEO. There's nothing magic about a tag - it's a link to your content organized in different ways

Tags are part of what's called your site's taxonomy - i.e. how it organizes its information. Tags allow the visitor to get listings of your existing content grouped by different topics - much like categories do, but on a more granular scale. And there's the kicker - tag listings are just your regular content, but grouped differently.

Because they're the same content as exists elsewhere on the site, they can easily be seen as duplicate content by the search engines, leading to a dilution of the ranking power of the actual posts. (This issue can also occur with category listings if they're not handled correctly, which is why you're already no-indexing them).

Most WordPress SEO specialists actually recommend that tag pages be no-indexed - a command that tells the search engines to not even include them in search results as they can so easily confuse the search engines about which version of your site's content is most important.

So... use tags on a website if you think they will significantly add to the visitors' ability to understand and navigate your site. Then, make sure you've taken steps to ensure they don't confuse the search engines.

Do NOT use tags just because they're available. If you don't have a clear strategy for using them, don't clutter your site with them.

If you want an idea of how tags fit into a taxonomy, here's a real-work analogy:

Think of your blog as a book on raising kids, for example. The book would have a bunch of separate chapters on things like childbirth, schooling and education, care and feeding, discipline, family finances - you get the drift.

These are the equivalent to your blog's categories - broad topics that would allow someone to pick up your book and leaf through it, immediately understanding what the book's about, and enabling them to read just the sections that apply to them.

In the back of the book is the index. It's full of words and phrases that you have used a couple times in the book, but aren't topics that deserve a whole chapter (category). These are the equivalent of your tags. For example, perhaps you mention peanut butter in the care & feeding chapter. Later, you also mention in the schooling chapter that parents shouldn't send peanut butter sandwiches in kids' lunches because of the allergy risk to others. In addition, you mention PB in passing in the finance chapter as a cheap source of protein for kids meals.

Obviously there'd be no point in having a whole chapter (category) on peanut butter, but a reader might find it useful to have the index (tags) at the back of the book show them all the places in your book you've mentioned peanut butter.

That's a bit of a facetious example, but hopefully it gives you an idea of the different uses? If not, lemme know and I'll try to clarify further. Just remember, there's nothing magic about tags for SEO and they in fact carry some risk. They are for human visitors. If the visitors don't find them useful, they shouldn't be there.

Paul

[dealblogger]

Wow - thanks for all that info. I appreciate it. One quick question - can I forget tags altogether - and noindex them? I don't feel any need to use them on my site.

[ThompsonPaul]

Short answer - absolutely yes. If you can't make them provide a clear benefit to your visitors, don't use 'em.

Longer answer - still yes, but if you have enabled them but haven't used them at all up until now, you can also block crawling them in your robots.txt file (You'd also want to have the tag pages include a no-index metarobots tag in their headers, just in case)

Doing this would tell the search engines not to even waste their time trying to find the tag pages in the first place.

Paul

[dealblogger]

Ok I did click noindex tag pages in my metarobots tags. I have to figure out how to use my robots.txt file. Thanks again!

[evolvingSEO]

Hey there - I'm going to weigh in and just concur basically with Paul. Also just like to add a link to the wordpress resource post I did on Moz which breaks down a lot of the distinctions between tags and categories. Hope that helps too.

Link