What is the point of tags? (ignore last post)
-
I’m a bit clueless about them. What do they do and whose benefit are they for?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
-
Categories and tags serve two main purposes: being picked up by search engines is the one, organizing your blog and helping visitors navigate it is the other. In addition, while categories and tags in your sidebar link to your posts, categories and tags under a post link to the global WP pages: this helps visitors find related posts in other blogs, and is good for your traffic as well.
Categories should be the general sub-groups of your posts while tags should be more specific key-words related to the content of a particular post; categories can have sub-categories too. Categories are obligatory, tags are optional. For search engines and global pages, categories and tags are exactly the same thing.
-
-
If you mean from under each post, the only themes with that option are iNove and Monochrome.
-
-
The Inuit Types theme also displays both Tags and Categories at the end of the post. Although there are those who do not think displaying Tags is aesthetically pleasing there is no way I would ever place aesthetics above the ability of my readers to click those Tags to locate additional associated content in my blog, and there’s no way I would do anything could amount to playing hide and seek with search engines.
-
But hiding the tags from the post metadata in iNove and Monochrome (or via CSS) makes them invisible to readers only, not to search engines.
-
Good to know but that only covers half of the issue. We create public blogs for our readers and if we truly are putting our readers first then their ability to access full contents in the blog ought to trump our aesthetic preferences.
If I’m a potential targeted reader who teypes a term in a search engine that is a tag and I do click into your blog on a given post, then I want to be able to click that tag and find all the posts it’s assigned to in your blog.
If I can’t do that because that blogger chose to prioritize “hiding tags” above my ability to be able to access all their posts under that tag, I fail to be impressed.
-
But that’s what the sidebar widget is for. The tags on posts don’t link to “all the content assigned to that tag” except in the much broader sense that you have to wade through all the WP tagged posts to find them.
-
I could be totally wrong here but don’t search engines scan everything that goes on the web anyway – effectively creating tags out of all the words?
-
For example, I don’t use tags yet but I know from my Stats box that search engines have sent me traffic for a couple of my posts.
- The topic ‘What is the point of tags? (ignore last post)’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 