What Are Tags and How To Use Them in WordPress
March 28, 2008 | By Gobala Krishnan |
Tag is a very common word used in the blogosphere, but what does it really mean and how (or why) do you use it?
My definition of tags:
Tags are descriptive keywords used to label something.
But here’s the “correct” definition according to Wikipedia:
A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (a picture, a geographic map, a blog entry, a video clip etc.), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information.
How Do Tags Help You Market Your Blog?
When you use tags in your blog posts, other web 2.0 services like Technorati and MyBlogLog pick up these tags, and will display your latest blog posts in their “tag pages”.
That way, anyone visiting a page for the tag “obama” for example, probably trying to find the latest blog posts on the topic, would be able to find your blog and the specific post tagged “obama”.
If your blog uses high-traffic tags, you may end up getting more traffic but generally the links to your page will not stay on Technorati for long because as other similarly tagged posts come in, your entry gets pushed deeper and deeper into the site.
Next, displaying tags on your blog also helps with blog SEO or Search Engine Optimization. As a typical blog may have 10-50 posts per month and only 5-10 stay on the main page at any given time, the rest of the posts are eventually pushed into your archives, where the chances of a search engine finding them are smaller.
By displaying tags to your older posts, search engines get to index and re-index your pages, which can end up as more blog traffic.
Finally, tags help you to manage your blog content as an alternative to using categories, and also helps your visitors find more related posts base on tags you’ve assigned to individual blog posts.
Displaying Tags on Your Blog
When I first started using tags, the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin was all you needed to manage and display your tags.
However, the launch of WordPress 2.3 gave us internal tagging, so instead of using plugins like the wonderful Ultimate Tag Warrior, you can just specify tags in your WordPress blog’s “Write” page like you see below:
Now for some reason, most themes still do not automatically display these tags on your blog, including our WordPress themes (yet). S if you want to put them on your blog, here’s how you do it:
To display the current post’s theme, enter something like this in you blog’s single.php or index.php template file:
<?php the_tags(’X',’Y',’Z'); ?>
Here’s the breakdown of the variables in the code that you must replace:
- X is the text you want to appear BEFORE the displayed tags
- Y is the separator between tags
- Z is the text AFTER the displayed tags
On Easy Wordpress I formatted to code something like this:
<?php the_tags(’Tags:’, ‘,’ , ”); ?>
To insert the tags right after the content section of your post, put the codes somewhere like this:
With this simple line of code, you can vastly improve your blog’s search engine optimization as well as it’s marketing reach, using tags.
Displaying Tag Clouds on Your Blog
A tag cloud is basically a collection of tags, and the size of the text for each tag represents the amount of times the tag was used on a certain blog. Obviously the bigger the font, the more popular the tag. You can use Technorati’s tag cloud as an example.
Wikipedia’s definition of tag cloud:
A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag.
To have a tag cloud on your sidebar is easy, just log into your WordPress dashboard and use the WordPress widgets to do it. However, if you want to display your tag cloud on your blog pages, you have to use this code, and manually insert it into your theme files:
<?php wp_tag_cloud(''); ?>
Tag clouds are useful, though in my opinion not as useful as individual tags on your blog posts.
Tags: tag cloud, tagging, tags, technorati, themes, Wordpress
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Nice article. I have one point though - putting up a tag cloud helps visitors to check out relevant old posts and that way give exposure to blog’s old content.