WordPress is one of the most popular website creation platforms in the world, powering more than 30 million active sites. Its user-friendly tools help small business owners create web pages, blog posts, and professional guides quickly. WordPress also offers built-in features, free themes, and powerful plugins for search engine optimization, including schema, categories, and tags. This guide shows you how to take advantage of WordPress tagging best practices for SEO success.
Do Tags in WordPress Help With SEO?
WordPress tags don’t directly boost your site’s search rankings, but categories do. When you use WordPress categories to organize your site, you improve its crawlability and contribute to better SEO.
That doesn’t mean WordPress tags are useless from an SEO perspective, however. Tagging best practices improve the user experience and make it easier for visitors to find the content they need.
This can lead to increased traffic, a lower bounce rate, and better user engagement — people spending more time reading guides and articles on your site. These metrics do help your site’s SEO.
What Are WordPress Tagging Best Practices for SEO?
For tags to improve site navigation, you have to use them correctly. The goal isn’t to add as many tags as you can think of for each topic. Instead, you should use WordPress tags to strengthen your site’s categories and subcategories.
| Category Examples | Subcategory Examples | WordPress Tags | |
| Home Remodeling Business | Kitchen Remodeling | Kitchen islands Flooring installation Electrical | Light fixtures Open-concept kitchens Kitchen cabinets Wood flooring |
| Bathroom Remodeling | Bathtubs Showers Plumbing Bathroom fixtures | Luxury bathroom Freestanding bathtubs Toilets Metal fixtures | |
| Home Exteriors | Outdoor Kitchens Decks & Patios Pools | Outdoor lighting Pergolas Grilling Pool care | |
| Law Firm | Personal Injury | Medical Malpractice Worker’s Compensation | Wrongful death Personal Injury FAQs Disability Benefits |
| Auto Accidents | Car Accidents Motorcycle Accidents Truck Accidents | Liability No-Fault Insurance [State] Accident Laws | |
| Business Litigation | Contracts Employment Law | NDAs Liability Waivers Bankruptcy |
See the way categories branch out? This is what a healthy layout looks like. Visitors and SEO crawlers like order, not chaos.
The Easiest Way To Optimize WordPress Tags for SEO
We’ve helped countless brands and small businesses improve their search rankings with our expert content creation and SEO consulting services for WordPress.
An Example of The Benefits of WordPress Tags
To understand why WordPress tags are so helpful for your visitors, compare two imaginary home remodeling websites.
The “Messy Builders” site is an organizational and SEO nightmare. It doesn’t have tags.
What happens when visitors try to find blog posts on bathroom tile installation? Nothing appears. Their only alternative is to wade through every article, a frustrating experience.
On the other hand, “Expert Home Remodeling” uses WordPress tags for each post, like “bathroom remodeling,” “flooring,” “installation,” and “user guides.”
With these tags, visitors can filter blog posts quickly regardless of date. In just a few seconds, they locate the “Guide to Bathroom Tile Remodeling Projects” article.
How Many Tags Should I Use on WordPress?
There’s no specific best practice for the number of tags to use on WordPress websites. Add as many tags as you need to provide the best user experience.
If you have a lot of products, you’re going to need more categories and tags to organize the content. Smaller companies that specialize in one or two main services can get by with less.
What you want to avoid is having tags with a single article. WordPress tags should always make sense for the content and be useful to your customers, tying together articles that naturally complement each other.
How Can You Follow SEO Best Practices for Tags in WordPress?
Creating tags in WordPress isn’t difficult. The tricky part is knowing when to use them.
Know the Difference Between Tags and Categories
Tags and categories have different strengths and benefits in WordPress. For one thing, tags don’t have any hierarchy. You can add them to any content (including FAQs), no matter where it is on your site.
Another big difference is that WordPress tags are optional. They don’t directly impact SEO, so there’s no pressure to create them just because.
In contrast, every WordPress page or article needs to fit into a category or subcategory. This isn’t optional, at least not if you want your site to rank.
Use categories and subcategories for the broad themes on your site. Assign tags to narrower themes or topics that don’t fit into one specific category. Some examples include “Trends,” “Buyer’s Guides,” and “Learn More” articles, like our SEO guides.
Set Tags To NoIndex, NoFollow
We know that this seems strange, but trust us, it’s a best practice for SEO. “Why would I want to block Google from crawling my tags?” you’re probably asking.
The reason is that WordPress creates a separate tag page for every tag you create. If you have 50 tags, that’s 50 extra web pages, all with minimal content and similar article links.
That’s a recipe for disaster. Google would take one look at all of those low-quality pages and lower your site’s reputation.
It’s easy to set tags to noindex and nofollow with a WordPress plugin like Yoast SEO. Just go to the “Titles & Metas” section for tag pages, click on “Taxonomies,” and choose the noindex option.
Plan Your Tags
The real secret to success with tags is good research and planning. Instead of coming up with tags on the fly, choose them ahead of time. Map your site’s current content and planned posts, and create a list of tags that you want to highlight.
This process is something you should be doing for your content planning anyway, so you can kill two birds with one stone. Tags can even help you speed up your permalink and internal linking efforts.
Don’t Confuse Tags With Keywords
Don’t make the mistake of treating tags like keywords. There’s zero reason to have multiple versions of the same tag, like “Bathroom Tile,” “Best Bathroom Tile,” and “Bathroom Tile Installation.” Only choose one tag per topic, though it’s OK to use multiple tags per article if the content supports them.
Discover More WordPress Tagging Best Practices and SEO Tips
At BKA Content, we love helping website owners achieve SEO success. We have over 15 years of experience creating high-quality content that follows best practices for tagging and SEO in WordPress. Simplify your workload with our expert SEO and content creation services today.
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