Tags, in WordPress, are a little pieces of data that you can tie to posts.
From the perspective of building a website to drive traffic to your store, they are an excellent mechanism for doing the following:
- Getting extra keywords into a page
- Providing quick, relevant navigation to potential customers
To start with, you really do not need to setup any tags, but you do need to know how to put them to good use while creating your site.
Making good use of post tags in WordPress
As you are likely selling products or services if you are reading this, the most critical things to keep in mind about tags are the following:
- Create tags for aspects of your products
This means that if you are selling an antique spoon from a particular history in time which was made by a particular person and the spoon is made of hand crafted silver, you should be adding at least the following tags:- A tag for the time period
- A tag for the maker
- A tag for hand crafted
- A tag for spoon (or silverware)
- A tag for silver
By doing so, you are adding extra pieces of long tail keywords to your site while giving potential customers links to quickly take a look at other content on your site which shares each tag.
- Don’t create tags that mirror post categories
- You already have post categories setup for the same purpose…so doing so just creates unnecessary clutter.
- Chances are good that if they found the page they are on, they found it by the category, so such tags would be less useful than normal anywise
How to create a category tag
Normally, you will create category tags while you are creating posts by entering them into the Tags box on the add new post page. However, if you really want to add tags manually outside of creating posts, here is how to do so:
- Log into your WordPress admin panel
- Select "Posts" → "Post Tags" from the admin menu
- Enter a name for your tag
- Leave the tag slug blank
It will be created automatically from the tag. - Enter a short description for your tag (if wanted)
Normally these are not used by themes, but some themes do use them. - Select "Add Tag"
This will add your tag and display it in the list of currently existing tags.
