WordPress Tags and categories are ways to sort the articles into taxonomies, so people can find more articles on the same topic quickly and efficiently.
There seems to be an idea that using tags in WordPress will boost your SEO. The logic is, if they tag an article with a whole bunch of words and phrases, then the article will have a better chance of ranking in search results.
This is a myth, they have absolutely no effect on SEO, and could actually be harmful by creating duplicate content.
WordPress Tags Giving an SEO Boost
I’ve been seeing people using this technique for many years. However, it doesn’t do anything to the ranking of your blog post. All it does is create clutter and make it more difficult for your reader to actually use WordPress tags the way they were intended.
To make a page rank, you have to mention the keyword phrases you are trying to rank for in the main content of the article. I would also recommend using the main keyword in the title tag of the post, and in some of the sub-headlines. Google will also look for other words that are associated with the main keyword phrase that you are trying to rank for.
For all you Yoast SEO users, here’s a tip: I index my category pages and noindex my tag pages. This is to prevent duplicate content and force Google to choose between a category and a tag page for which one is most relevant.
Summary
To sum up, WordPress tags do not influence SEO. If you want to rank for a given search phrase, use that in the title, meta description, body of the article, the H1 (main headline), and sub-headlines (H2, H3, H4, H5, H6).
Would you like a WordPress site developed or perhaps SEO tweaks to make your site index better? Drop Us a mail
