One of most popular posts I wrote is on A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com Users, which offers a step-by-step process of how to create the tags and signature you find at the bottom of every post that I write. I’d like to clear up a little confusion about tags in WordPress.com for you.
1. A Tag is a Keyword in a Link
A tag is a keyword. It is created by adding the attribute rel="tag" in any link going any where.
<a href="https://lorelle.wordpress.com/" title="Lorelle on WordPress" rel="tag">Lorelle on WordPress</a>
This creates a “tag” for “Lorelle on WordPress”. The tag is the words which the link wraps around. Without it, it’s just a link. No more, no less.
With it, it is recognized by search engines and tag services crawlers which add that word or phrase to their “tag database”, acting like a keyword. When a visitor types in the tag word or phrase in a search engine or tag service, like Technorati, any post with that “tag” or those keywords, even if not tags, will turn up in the results.
I’d like to emphasis the following as it applies to the process of tags and tagging.
- When pinged or as part of their normal schedule, search engines and tag services send out crawlers to your blog which scan your entire post and add it their directory. If they have a feature that recognizes the
rel="tag"in a link as a tag, it adds your tags to a section in their database, and your tags help them to categorize your post. - Search engines and tag services store most or all of your entire post in their database. Any search of their “tags” will also include searching every word in your stored post data to generate the search results. Search results are not limited to only tags.
- A tag link can be to anything or any where. It does not have to be a link to Technorati. You will not be penalized for linking to non-Technorati sites.
2. Tags Serve Three Purposes.
- Tags link readers to keyword related content, on or off your blog.
- Tags help group content by category and keyword.
- Tags are recognized by search engines and tag services crawlers as tags and they are treated like keywords.
Tags do not cause people to rush to your blog. Tags do not increase traffic. Tags do not help search engines add you to their databases. Tags do not help your page ranking. Tags do not cause readers to be impressed with what you write. Tags do not help you with social climbing or social bookmarking.
Pings get the attention of search engines and tag services, not tags. The keywords in your post content helps search engines and tag services define your content for searchability and page rank.
3. Tags That Link Off-site Escort Visitors Out the Door.
When Technorati began, the idea of tags was based upon the mythology of “Web 2.0”, the social determination of which content and information should “rise to the top”. By assigning “tags” to articles or blogs, it helped categorize the information.
The categories were set by the blogger, helping to micro-categorize their writing topics, and therefore make it for you, the author, to control your content categories, and make it easier to search by tag categories rather than a free-for-all search dependent upon the mysteries of search engine page rankings. To participate in this new social “tagging” experience, you would go to Technorati and search for “tag words” to find related content, creating a new way of searching but also competition for other search engines like Google and Yahoo.
Tag users were encouraged to set their tags to link to Technorati so those reading their blogs would have the option find related content on the topic via Technorati. This is nice. It helps the reader find related content from a variety of sources, not just yours.
But what if you have 300 articles written on the same topic? Your link to Technorati just told the visitor to leave your site and find their information elsewhere.
If 5 people had posts with your same tag, it didn’t matter because theoretically your 300 posts would be listed under that tag on Technorati. But if 46,000 people have written 164,327 posts with your same tag, your 300 related articles would be lost in the crowd. Especially as Technorati lists search results chronologically rather than as “most likely to meet your needs” and you haven’t posted anything using that tag for 2 weeks and 6,986 posts by other people.
Do you think that the reader will scroll through that many posts on the list to find your posts? Hmm?
Depending upon where a tag links to, tags do help the reader find related content off your blog. It can also help the reader find related content on your blog. Depending upon your blog’s content and purpose, you might want to consider offering tags to Technorati, Google, news services, WordPress.com, or other sites. Or you might have enough articles that you want to only allow the reader to view related content on your own blog. Or you might want to offer a combination of both to give your readers options. Below is information on providing the various on-site and off-site tag links.
4. WordPress Comes With Tags Built-In
WordPress, whether the full version of WordPress or WordPress.com, comes ready out-of-the-box with a tagging system built in. To create a “tag”, simple add a category to your category list and file the post in one or more of those categories. Automatically, the category is a tag.
How?
WordPress Themes generally use the wp_list_cats() template tag to generate a list of your blog categories, typically in the sidebar. WordPress programming functions automatically adds rel="tag" to all generated category lists on your blog.
If you want more tags, then you have some options for adding tags on a per-post basis and/or a tag cloud or tag heat map. For full version WordPress bloggers, I highly recommend The Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin. For WordPress.com bloggers, I recommend A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com Users. WordPress.com bloggers can also create a tag cloud such as I have on my site map, grouped by topic.
5. Categories as Tags Presents Challenges for WordPress Blogs
In WordPress, if you use categories as tags, the tags apply to your entire blog, not your posts. The list of categories typically appears in your sidebar. This presents some interesting challenges for the wise WordPress blogger.
Categories which link to “categorized” posts on your WordPress blog increase navigation on your site. They help the visitor find related content and move around from one group topic to another. I think of categories as a table of contents for your blog and tags as the index.
If you use categories as tags, then keep your category/tags to only a few. As they are displayed typically in the sidebar, a long list of tags in your sidebar can make it really, really long. The reader will have to scroll a long way down the page to see all of the topics you write about. If you have Pages, blogroll, feeds, ads, or other things in your sidebar, you end up with a seriously long sidebar. Is this pretty? Is this useful? Do 56 “categories as tags” really help your readers navigate your blog? Think about it.
If you are using a Kubrick/Default-based WordPress Theme, there is usually no sidebar on your single post view, only on the multi-post views of your blog. This means they won’t see your full category list on the single posts, but they will when viewing the front page of your post where you have more than one post displayed. The only categories shown in the single post view for those types of Themes are the categories belonging specifically to that post.
What are the odds that the new visitor arrived on the front page of your blog where all your categories are visible? Slim or none, right? You can pick the Theme you want, but pay attention to where your navigational aids are if you restrict your tags to the built-in categories with WordPress.
Category lists in WordPress Themes are not listed as tags visually. So the reader only recognizes them as categories not tags. Or some WordPress Themes and WordPress bloggers change the title of Categories to something else, like “Topics I Write About” or “My Stuff” or “Topics”. How do they know these are tags as well as categories? Should they? Do you treat categories differently from tags as you read and navigate through other’s blogs? Should people know there is a difference or that they are exactly the same?
Categories as tags in your WordPress Theme sidebar result in a listing of posts on your site when clicked. What if you do want to provide off-site links to related content with tags? Since WordPress doesn’t automatically provide that, you have to add the feature with The Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin or A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com Users.
If you add tags to your posts, how will you let the reader know if they they are about to leave your site or stay on? Some title the tags “Technorati Links” or “Technorati Tags” as a clue. I title mine “Site Search Tags”, advising people that clicking these links will keep them on my site, not off.
There is a lot of thought that should go into your tagging and category decisions, and as much thought into deciding how to incorporate tags and categories into your WordPress blog. Identifying which are “categories” and which are “tags” may not be important, since they are basically the same, but most people treat them differently. Maybe you should, too.
6. Using Tags As Blog Navigation.
As mentioned in Point 3, tags which link to off-site references encourage readers to leave your blog. I like to think of my tags as helpful blog navigation. I like to help my readers find related content on my blog, and I like to keep them on my blog. Therefore, I manually add tags to the bottom of every post. These on-site tags are called “site search tags” or “intrasite links”. When clicked, they generate a list of related articles on my blog.
The tags are also post-specific, set on a post-by-post basis. While I only have a few categories, I can have dozens of tags listed on my posts. My posts can be on a variety of subjects and I can direct the reader to very specific information that I might only have one or two articles about. Why would I need a whole category for a one post topic? I use the tags to act as a sub-grouping of categories. “Micro-categories”, if you will. These are created manually, not by any special feature for WordPress users.
To set your tags to links on your site, you can set any link in your post as a tag or create a list, like I have at the bottom of the post, that link to search results on this blog based upon the tag keyword.
To create a tag link to another post on your site, add the link and then add the relationship to the link HTML:
<a href="https://lorelle.wordpress.com/2005/10/14/a-tagging-bookmarklet-for-wordpress-and-wordpresscom-users/" title="Tagging bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com users" rel="tag">A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com Users</a>
To create tag links to intrasite post search results, you can use one of the following, either written manually or used with the A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com Users or The Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin:
<a href="https://lorelle.wordpress.com/index.php?s=tagname" title="Site Search Tags" rel="tag">tagname</a>
<a href="/index.php?s=tagname" title="Site Search Tags rel="tag"">tagname</a>
The results show will be a search results page based upon the “tagname” keyword, such as tags.
7. Using Tags To Link to Off-site Content.
If you choose to set your post-specific tags to offsite content, you have a lot of options. Again, I recommend The Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin or A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com Users.
To set the off-site location for your tag links, here are some examples (I left the titles off for clearer code, but make sure you put titles back in for compliance with accessibility standards):
- Technorati:
<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/tagname" rel="tag">tagname</a> - WordPress.com:
<a href="http://wordpress.com/tag/tagname" rel="tag">tagname</a> - Del.icio.us:
<a href="http://del.icio.us/tag/tagname" rel="tag">tagname</a> - IceRocket:
<a href="http://blogs.icerocket.com/tag/tagname" rel="tag">tagname</a> - TagJag:
<a href="http://tagjag.com/discovery/tagname" rel="tag">tagname</a> - BlinkList:
<a href="http://www.blinklist.com/tag/tagname" rel="tag">tagname</a> - BlogMarks:
<a href="http://www.blogmarks.net/marks/tag/tagname" rel="tag">tagname</a> - RawSugar:
<a href="http://www.rawsugar.com/search/tagname" rel="tag">tagname</a> - Sphere:
<a href="http://www.sphere.com/featured-blogs?q=tagname" rel="tag">tagname</a> - Google Blogsearch:
<a href="http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=tagname" rel="tag">tagname</a> - Yahoo MyWeb Tags:
<a href="http://myweb.yahoo.com/myweb?ei=UTF-8&dg=6&tag=tagname" rel="tag">tagname</a> - Lorelle on WordPress:
<a href="https://lorelle.wordpress.com/index.php?s=tagname" rel="tag">tagname</a>
Hey, why not offer links to my blog for more information on a variety of tag topics? 😉
You can find more tagging options for WordPress blogs in A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and wordpress.com Users. Note that this is what I use below to “sign” on all my posts. It includes the horizontal line and the signature and 9Rules graphics, so I encourage WordPress.com users to have some fun with this easy to use technique and add some personalization to their blogs. I’ll be talking about how to bling bling visually accessorize your WordPress.com blogs soon, so use this bookmarklet technique to jump ahead of the rest of the crowd.
Understand Tagging a Little Better Now?
I hope this helps to clear up the differences and similarities between tags and categories. They are the same but different, and you can use them in a variety of ways to help you with your blog navigation and connection with off-site content. Think about how you use tags and categories when you read blogs, and then think about how tags and categories work on your blog. And let me know what you think about all of this.
Related Articles
- A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and wordpress.com Users
- Categories versus Tags – What’s the Difference and Which One?
- The Problems With Tags and Tagging
- Categories versus Tags: Defining the Limitations
- The Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin
- Helping the Ultimate Tag Warrior Work with Jerome’s Keywords WordPress Plugins
- Adding Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati and Slashdot Links to Your WordPress Blog
- Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags
- Tagging With Emotions Not Common Sense
- Tags Are Not Categories – Got It?
- What Do You Blog About? Check Your Tags
- Playing Tag With WordPress
- Top 10 Tips for Technorati Tricks
- Tidying Up Tags – A Technical Review
- Lorelle on WordPress Now Part of Technorati Tools
- Combining Ultimate Tag Warrior With Jerome’s Keywords WordPress Plugins – Meet Tags in the Head
- Link Referrals – Linking to Site Search Tags
- Abuse: Keyword Spamming versus Tag Spamming
Site Search Tags: tags, tag, tagging, category, categories, tags+and+categories, tag+and+category, links, off-site, offsite, intrasite, onsite, on-site, intrasite+links, search, search, engine, tag+service, directory, traffic, navigation, technorati, wordpress, wordpress.com, wordpresscom, wordpressdotcom, keyword, keywords
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network
Lorelle on WordPress 
76 Comments
Really , a welcoming article , lorelle . Your writing is lucid and now , you can keep me “a One hour Test on TAGS “. I have really understood what are tags now .
Thanks .
I Run http://www.rani-mukharji.com/wordpress/ , for which your site , is an invaluble resource /
Thanks Again ,,
And now u have a returning visitor , every day , ME..:D
Lorelle, thank you for sharing this very informative article with your readership. I was trying to gain a little knowledge about tags and I found it here.
Rose DesRochers
Interesting article on tags, great explanations.
Great info – but, if you’ll excuse me, I would take issue in one respect. The description in the first section is of ‘anchor text’ not really a ‘tag’
The essence of a tag comes from xml schema, and is that it is part of a ‘flat’ classification, not a hierarchy. For example, on del.icio.us, one tag is as important as any other and they can be mixed and matched any which way. The old way, eg the OpenDirectory, is to have a rigid hierarchy with parent categories more important than children.
Tags are indeed democracy…
Agreed to a point.
The difference between an anchor text and a link as it pertains to a tag is the use of the
rel="tag". Without the link you only have keywords. With the relationship, the keyword becomes a tag inside of a link. How else is a tag defined on a blog? If there is a way, I’d love to know it.As for the technical classification of tags after they are “collected” from your site, or used upon other sites, you are right.
As for a tag being a democracy and no one tag being as important as any other, this is what I believed in the beginning, too. Search engine’s programming and algorithms weight the information searched. They evaluate the keywords in the search phrase with a variety of information and judgments, and return a weighed result.
Searching a tag service does mean that no weight is applied to any one tag, and that they all are equal, EXCEPT that currently search results for most tagging services return with two methods that make the results and the tags unequal: chronological order and/or number of links to the tagged post.
When the search results are biased toward chronological order, only the most recent are shown, therefore, only what is current gets to the top of the list. There may be something even more valuable and applicable in the search results, but it was written 4 months ago, therefore, many pages into the search results list. This “youth rules” technique puts more emphasis on the young posts and less on the old, and I call that age bigotry. 😉 It’s not always about the hottest, latest, and newest thing.
Tag search results which are weighted by popularity carry more of a democratic feel where the popular posts get the most attention, similar to search engine page ranking.
Tags are related to individual posts, not blogs. What if I’m looking for a body of work on a topic? Using tags services for my searching, I only get individual posts connected with the keyword tag. It doesn’t recognize a body of work with 400 uses of the keyword tag. Nor does it reflect the number of times the tag keyword is used on the individual post or within the entire blog, which might make it a more applicable find.
Yes, tags can be mixed and matched in any way, but so can keywords. I was really hoping that tags would replace or enhance keywords, leading towards micro-categorization combined with page rank and other search engine technologies which will return more applicable results, but it is still early days. It will be interesting to see what the next step in tagging is. I predict it will be a more Google-search-patent-like technology that will improve the credibility of the social bookmarking and tag search results. A form of “drilling down”, such as found on the OpenDirectory, is also necessary to improve the directory search process, looking for synonyms and variations on the word, not just sub-categories. The tagging process is fairly simple and has spread faster than wild fire. Now it is time for the search results to improve. And it will be interesting to watch.
(Fortunately) I agree – I was speaking in a boring theoretical way of how a tag is defined as part of a flat taxonomy – yes, in the real world, other factors rapidly interfere.
You accurately touch on the point that the way in which search engines handle keywords is essentially as tags and that the problem lies in the ORDER BY not the initial SELECT. We could certainly discuss the iniquities of G’s algorithm, and their even more appalling Pagerank, as people do interminably, but nobody has produced something better yet (they will, but not so far) and this is the only test of worth.
(Equally fortunately, I am very very old and immune to this month’s big thing… )
hello,
very nice article but I there is one thing I would like to know more about:
what about the impact of a tag-cloud located in the sidebar be on search engines?
I mean the robots would pick up the tag cloud together with my content so it would integrate the tag cloud into search results which is not good in my opinion.
regards
Ovidiu
Ovidiu: Timing is everything. I have an article coming out soon on that very topic. A tag cloud (or tag heat map) in the sidebar, footer, post meta data section, or anywhere on your blog acts like links. Search engines follow it and some, like Google and Yahoo, treat the generated page as a single, identifiable page on your blog. You tell me if that is a good thing or not? 😉 Web crawlers can’t distinguish from tagged links and links. They are just links to follow to new pages on your blog. And the tagged words found on each “page”, the search engine treats them just like the rest of your content. So how do you think that would impact your SEO standings?
well lets say I have 100 pages or posts, doesn’t really matter. And each of these pages/posts has a tag cloud showing my top 25 tags in a tag cloud inside the sidebar, that influences in my opinion the search engines to think I have optimized my 100 pages to get a high ranking for exactly these 25 keywords, which will not work, as these keywords are a sum of all keywords of my whole blog.
did you now get what I was aiming at? I just did not want to tell you my conclusion before asking for your opinion. what you were talking about is a separate tag page which is ok in my opinion, but what about a tag cloud in the sidebar?
thx for your input so far
ovidiu
I am not talking about a separate tag page. Few tags are highlighted only on a separate page. They are incorporated into the post pages, found in sidebars, posts, and footers.
For my opinion on the issue of tags as keywords influencing search engines, see Abuse: Keyword Spamming Versus Tag Spamming.
Thanks for this post. I always wondered if WordPress categories and “tags” were the same thing or not.
I came across your blog a few months ago but this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time reading through your posts. Thanks for putting all this information together on tags and categories.
I agree with your point that categories should be seen as a table of contents and that tags should be used as the index. I’ve got too many categories on my site, I only show the list of categories on my search page because there are so many of them! I often have categories with only a couple of posts which seems silly too.
Time for me to try out this Ultimate Tag Warrior and rethink how I use categories and tags. One thing I do use on my site is a category called “Featured Posts” for example, where I like to list posts in that category in the sidebar. Hopefully I can achieve the same effect if I reduce my categories to a much shorter list and start using tags more?
Your welcome to provide some feedback on my site too. I’ve still got a lot to learn when it comes to web site design 🙂
Can I find the description and tutorials about creating a tag system that allow performing tag’s searching, tag cloud, related stories,…?
I’m not sure what more you want? I’ve included links within the article and at the bottom on how to tag your WordPress blog with categories, manual tags, and WordPress Plugin tags. From those, you can create tag clouds and other tagging efforts.
Can you be more specific with what you are searching for?
Tagging will be in the next big release of WordPress and I’ll have more information on that soon.
Great article! I just upgraded to WordPress 2.3 and it has tagging built-in so us WordPress users can now use categories *and* tags. It even has a category-to-tag converter where you can just check off all those one-off categories you have and it’ll convert the posts that are categorized with them to have tags instead. Of course, then you’ll have to re-categorize the posts too, but it should just put them in the “General” category, which is not so bad.
I came across your blog looking for how to manage the tags that I’ve used so far, but it seems it’s not in the admin panel (I use SpotMilk, so that might be why). Or, maybe I’m supposed to make a tag cloud and navigate around with that.
Yay wordpress for releasing this functionality!
The new version of WordPress does not offer any method of managing tags, but there are new WordPress Plugins which do help. The belief of WordPress Developers, currently, is that tags are “one off” per post and not given the same manageability as Categories.
WARNING: As you mentioned, if you choose to convert your current categories to tags, it removes all the categories from your category list and dumps all posts into whatever your default category is, usually Uncategorized. You then have to go through and categorize all of your posts again, unless you choose to replace categories with tags, something I DO NOT recommend. Categories are more important than tags.
I recommend you manually add categories to your tags rather than converting categories to tags.
Adding tags to past posts manually will trigger another possible sweep by search engines. Doing it through conversion probably won’t trigger the pings to attract the search engines. Removal of your categories may create a lot of dead links (404) when searchers find your category pages in their searches until the index is updated.
Wow, that’s a lot of information to read.
Thanks
That is awsome information for me Lorelle. Hence I was just looking around for comments on UTW and the follow up things from Christine, when I did bounce on this article. Makes me consider about my tagging and my categories. Cause I do not simply want to send the reader away from my blog. Thank you for the extremely clear article!! Happy 2008 🙂
@ GuyHenri:
Thank you. And I hope you learned that UTW is no longer supported nor needed in the latest version of WordPress. Christine has created some powerful Plugins to support the new native tagging in WordPress. Check those out.
Hi Lorelle,
GuyHenri again.. When it comes to the sites I have in mind, I still do not know how to use tags/categories on a WordPress blog. Plse keep in mind I am new to blogging, hope your book I just ordered will arrive soon:-).
In the meantime… My blog is supposed to be commenting and hinting about all kinda things interesting for the music collector.
This can be e.g. a unique item from The Rolling Stones somewhere for sale or for auction. Tagging “The Rolling Stones” won’t bring me much further I guess, and using a category like “unique items” wont bring Stones’ fans ….
Since I write about different music styles this should bring different people to my site, but i cannot use a thousand tags???
Wonder what ‘s your opinion Lorelle.
Thks anyway, have a nice day!
GuyHenri
@ guyderidder:
Tags will not bring people to your site. Categories might, but also not likely. These help people most when they get there, not before they arrive.
For help on really exploring your categories see this series I did on the Blog Herald:
Blog Post Category Trauma: How To Help Bloggers With Useless Categories
Blog Post Category Trauma: Suggestions for Useless Categories
Blog Post Category Trauma: Fixing Those Useless Categories
Blog Post Category Trauma: Changing Your Categories in WordPress
The key to categories is to create a table of contents for your readers to go to the areas they are specifically interested in. Tags are micro categories, like index words, and fewer and fewer people are using them when they visit your blog, so use them judiciously.
Create a category if you have at least 20 posts within it already is my best recommendation.
Also, look at how other music collector blogs are doing it. And then dig down deeper and specialize in your area of music collection. Maybe you only write on classical or rock and not everything that has to do with collecting. Or maybe you only specialize in baroque classical music.
Many thanks Lorelle :-))
GuyHenri
Wow, thanks. I feel like now I can be an ultimate tag warrior. I’ve been using wordpress I think since version 1.5 or something like that. And now with this new tagging system with WordPress 2.3 I am starting to see more connections to how togas are used on my wordpress blogs and in the general web.
wow- I finally understand tags– I have a wfrree wordpress blog and a free blogger blog. I did an experiment. I only wrote a few posts on the wordpress blog and it got indexed by google right away. has continual traffic even though I haven’t done anything to promote the blog.
Then I started a blog on blogger have written continual good content on my blogger blog, have promoted the blog in forums and it has almost to nothing of visitors.
Sooo I think that the reaons for this is the tags- nI think the tags have gotten me lots of visitor nd gotten me indexed by google.
You just explained why. The tag feature in wordpress is truly amazing. So now I will be leaving blogger and oming to wordpress for good:-)
I recently discovered your blog and find it a great help. However on this tags thing, after a first reading, I’m still lost. I’ll go over it again, but even more examples would help.
@ Jim McDaniel:
Unless you are more clear, and have read through the recommended and related articles on the subject, I don’t know what more you might need.
Tags are like index words associated with your blog content. Keywords, if you will. Categories are your blog’s table of contents. Tags can be links to content within your site, often called onsite tags or site search tags, and tags can also connect with offsite content on Technorati, Delicious, and other tagging and social networking services.
What more could I tell or show you to help you understand better what tags are all about?
Hi,
Thanks for this very informative article, but, I’m still confused about something on WordPress.com. When I create Categories, I would expect them to link to things categorized ON MY BLOG, but instead, they link to all kinds of other sites on WordPress. This behavior doesn’t seem consistent! Sometimes the category link will begin with wordpress.com/category, but what I want is for categories to refer to my pages – thus, categories would like to wordpress.com/category.
I tried just using tags instead, but, the options for displaying tags via the widgets look awful – the tag cloud text is not balanced, a tag with a couple posts will appear way too large, and even run off the page.
Any explanation for the strange categories linking behavior? Or tips for a better-looking tag display?
Many thanks! /Nick Patterson
@ Nick Patterson:
Ah, yes, well, define “normal”. 😀 According to WordPress.com developers, having the categories link to EVERYONE on WordPress.com with the same “tag” gets your blog posts more exposure. Since this doesn’t seem to be the reality for a lot of WordPress.com users, there are a lot of complaints and requests in the WordPress.com forum to change this. I recommend you go make more noise as one of those who doesn’t like this feature either.
This is why I use the A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com Users to create my own ON-SITE tags at the bottom of my blog posts. Once set up, it takes only a couple seconds to add manually to every blog post I write here.
As for the tag clouds, I don’t use them for the same reasons. If you have CSS Extras enabled, you can control the look a little more, but I agree.
Wish I could offer you better suggestions but you are totally right.
I have self-hosted blog and I would like to convert my categories to tags. As you said: Adding tags to past posts manually will trigger another possible sweep by search engines. Doing it through conversion probably won’t trigger the pings to attract the search engines. Removal of your categories may create a lot of dead links (404) when searchers find your category pages in their searches until the index is updated.
Is there any solution available to avoid dead links?
@ Aarne:
If you are using the latest version of WordPress, such actions may not result in 404 errors as WordPress now has an amazing built-in redirect with permalinks, though I recommend asking in the WordPress Support Forum to check that this applies to categories. I know it works with posts.
You can create redirects, which isn’t that hard, within the .htaccess file. For more help, see Getting Under the Skin of the .htaccess File and WordPress Plugins To Help You Administer Your Blog for WordPress Plugins that may help with Redirects.
Thanks Lorelle for the great explanation. I am presuming that if I had 10 or so articles, maybe months old, that never had tags, that I can now add them and get them “re-pinged”?
that is the rough guess I am going for. Thanks again!
@ Brandon:
You can add tags whenever you want. However, don’t expect your world to rock and money to fall out of the sky because you do. 😀 We need to stop thinking of tags as SEO and roads to riches and as the navigational aids they really are. If you have strong categories, you don’t need tags.
Thanks for the great article. We use WordPress MU and a php script called RSS2html to publish feeds from several of our blogs onto html pages throughout our site. A problem I have encountered with Tags and Categories in WordPress is that in the RSS feed, they look the same. For example, in this feed: http://wesinthenews.blogs.wesleyan.edu/category/top-stories/feed
a post might have this show up in the RSS feed:
The problem is that Top Stories and Faculty are Categories. Campus Community News is a Tag. I need to be able to use the data in the Tag field (which we use in this blog as the source of the news article) as an eyebrow above the title of the post.
Any idea how I can make the Tag and the Categories separate in my feed? Thanks a lot!
See WordPress Category Feed Links in Your Post Meta Data Section and Understanding, Using, and Customizing WordPress Blog Feeds for help, but if you cross post to different categories or tags, the post will appear in more than one category or tag.
I just realized the code I pasted in here got erased. Let me try this again, as I read the articles you sent me to and they don’t seem to help in this situation.
<category><![CDATA[Faculty]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Top Stories]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Campus Community News]]></category>
Of the above code, “Faculty” and “Top Stories” are WordPress Categories. “Campus Community News” is a Tag.
I copied the code above out of one of the posts in this RSS feed: http://wesinthenews.blogs.wesleyan.edu/category/top-stories/feed
I don’t understand why WordPress doesn’t differentiate between Categories and Tags when it builds the RSS feed.
For example, I would like to have something like this:
<category><![CDATA[Faculty]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Top Stories]]></category>
<tag><![CDATA[Campus Community News]]></tag>
Is this possible somehow? Thanks so much in advance if anyone can help!
Again, the links I gave you show you how to set the URL for category and tag feeds. If you want them supplied to the readers, you have to put the manual links wherever you want them to be found within your WordPress Theme design. For example, if the bottom list is what you want in the sidebar, then manually go into your sidebar.php file and put in the feed links as you describe into the sidebar instead of using the WordPress template tags for generating those post and feed links.
If you are pulling out only tags, categories are tags in the eyes of WordPress and just about everyone, so any post with the tag and category of Campus Community News will appear in that feed alongside posts not in that category but tagged Campus Community News.
The WordPress Support Forum is your best resource for specific help on how to do all this. Someone there will be able to walk you through the process better than I can do here.
By the way, WordPress automatically strips out malformed or code in general in comments and posts by default. See Writing and Publishing Code in Your WordPress Blog Posts for more help on that.
Thanks a lot for your help Lorelle, I’m thinking I may need to use a custom field or something to accomplish what I am trying to accomplish. I appreciate your time.
This page is exactly what I was looking for since days. Thanks for posting. 🙂
thanks lorelle,, i just understand right now.. have coding you’re blog alone? as i knew CSS didn’t works here.. how do you create it?
Hi there I’m Dolores and although this is my first post I’ve been reading for a while and I guess it’s time that I said Aloha and introduced myself. I’m 28 and run a sports equipment business with my brother and live in sunny San Diego, California with my 3 wonderful children. I love running and golf but hate mushrooms…and I guess that’s all you need to know http://www.mysmiley.net/imgs/smile/happy/happy0071.gif
Right now a website I am working on has nofollow relation for all of the tags that I put at the end of a post. How do you remove that but not remove the no-follow on my comments? Is there a plugin?
It doesn’t matter. Nofollow/dofollow, they mean nothing. If you wish to change it, edit the template tag or look up one of the old Plugins that changes it. There were a lot of them, but either way, this is no longer of value one way or another. Search engines ignore them and track the links anyway.
I recall a few years ago when tags were all the rage.
Now, I’m doing some background research on WordPress tags in particular, and I’m really curious how much of this article is still valid.
I’m willing to follow up with extremely detailed questions in person, and might well be willing to do some due diligence to check up on current factual accuracy. I’ve subscribed to comments so I’ll catch your reply if you choose to reply (and if not, no big deal).
So much changes so fast.
The article continues to be valid, though Technorati is now, technically, history.
By “in person,” I mean directly by email. That was really unclear.
Hi Lorelle..
Thanks for this very nice article..
I have read this article of yours and your other articles as well. For some reason, the more I know about tags, the more I am getting confused..
I am very confused about usage of tags.
I have recently started a wordpress blog “how2designweb.wordpress.com”. I was concerned about getting some traffic to my blog. I know that it will take some time, but still I wanted to get equipped with all the possible steps which will help me in driving some traffic to my (wordpress.com) blog in the near future.
I have read your article in which you have explained the usage of tagging bookmarklet. It is a very good article. I thank you for sharing this good information. I used that and generated some tags for my blog posts. All the tags that I generated are linking to “technorati”. After reading your post, now I know that I can link my tags to any other bloging search engines (technorati, wordpress, googleblog etc).
I have one important question here. If all my tags are linking to technorati, does this mean that I need to have an account in tachnorati? Or else, if my tags are linking to any other blog search engine (say googleblog) then do I need to register with googleblog prior to generating the tags.
In some other articles that I have read, I came to know that I need to claim my blog in technorati, for the tagging search results to appear. Suppose If I do not claim my blog in technorati, (and I have generated the tags that link to technorati), then what happens? In this situation, If somebody goes to tachnorati and search with the tags (same tags that I have generated), then does it provide a link to my blog? or will my blog appear in the tagging search results? If yes, then it is very good.. But if the answer is no, then what is the purpose of tags that I have generated for my blog (that link to technorati).
Similarly, If I have generated the tags that link to some other blog search engines, then do I need to register in those places (or claim my blog in those places) for the search results to direct to my blog? Please help me in getting these answers. Now you know, how much confused I am about the tags 🙂
One more question. If I write any post in my wordpress blog, and publish it, then by default, wordpress pings technorati about my new post. My question is: If I am not registered in technorati (Or If I have not claimed my blog in technorati) then how will technorati keep a record of my post?
I am asking this question because, I went to technorati, and searched for the posts that I have already published in my wordpress blogs, but my blog did not appear in the search results. This is keeping me worried and concerned.
Please help me in getting the answers. Thanks in advance..
WordPress.com links all tags to WordPress.com links, not Technorati. There is no need to add more tagging to your site. WordPress.com handles all of it. Technorati is defunct. There is no need to claim your blog or anything else except as an exercise. Technorati ranking no longer has any influence over anything, nor is used by many to increase traffic.
It is more important that you focus on content and not play SEO games. They don’t work. Create quality content and have fun with the process as you learn.
WordPress does ping Technorati as well as dozens of other services through their built-in pinging service. Again, honestly quit focusing on seo games and concentrate on quality content. Don’t copy others, and realize that you’re blogging about an overblogged subject, so work hard to approach it in a unique way with your unique voice.
Thank you for explaining tags in a language that is easy to understand. I’ve been blogging for awhile now and never really understood how tags worked before. Thanks for the great content!
In relation to the things that tags DONT do. When you write that tags, “don’t increase traffic” what do you mean exactly? If, “Tags link readers to keyword related content…” wouldn’t this mean that by adding tags to your blog that you have more exposure on search engine sites and more of a chance that someone will stumble upon your site? Or am I confusing pings and tags? Thanks in advance for the help!
Tags have changed a lot over the years. Using tags does not “increase” your web traffic. It does improve your site’s navigation. Sure, it helps a little to increase your page being found in search results, but if you are using keywords that you haven’t used in the post content, it’s one word, not a shout out that you have the answer. Do you understand that? It’s the number of words and their synonyms that makes keywords important within the content, not just the tags.
Google and others are now treating category and tag pages as duplicate content, not penalizing them (unless they violate duplicate content guidelines) but minimizing their inclusion in search results.
Pings and trackbacks are completely different. See Blog Struggles: Trackbacks Count.
If you want to increase your traffic, write keyword rich content and promote your stuff on Twitter, Facebook, and to your fans wherever they hang out. Tags won’t do anything for you if you don’t have the content to back them up, except increase navigation on the site.
This is a great article, I’m still in the process of building a site and creating a blog some of it was overwhelming. I actually understood quite a bit of what you said but I have bookmarked this site to read again when I’ve got to grips a little more with basics. Thank you for your article.
Can yopu please help me that how should i go about the Tags in my post as am not still sure why tagging is so important for our post.. still have questions do tags helps in SEO…or any thing else..????? plzz help as am not a professional webdesigner but a student and please check out my web as well as am stil adding pots to my web page and want to improve plz suggest some thing..
Are you asking to hire me?
I’ve written a ton of articles on tagging, many of which are linked from here. Please check those out. Think of your site like a book. Categories are your site’s table of contents and tags are your index words. Nothing more, nothing less. Most sites don’t need tags. It’s up to you.
Keep working at it and study this blog and other similar ones and you will get it. It just takes time.
I always get confused while tagging. Your site have different ideas on tagging. It surely will help me understand while posting. Thanks
Aaaah! Tags. Categories. SEO. Technorati. Got it. Thank you.
Can you tag an entire blog?
I don’t understand the question. You can tag every POST in your entire blog but you can’t “tag” just a single blog.
What I mean is… if you have a blog that focuses on health and wellness.. can you tag the blog with those things? To where it’s your blog’s homepage that is the on the other end of a searched tag?
If your site is about health and wellness, then you have those as categories, I’m sure, and categories are tags in the world of WordPress and SEO. At least as far as search engines care, and they don’t care. It’s just a word in a link. Search engines do not recognize the notion of “tags” as we all thought they would many years ago. They never adopted them. You are trying to force SEO on tags. That is not what they are for. Tags are for micro-navigation. They are your index words. Searches are what happens in a search engine and tags have NOTHING to do with the end results of a search.
If you want the words to matter to search engines, use them in your post content as well as post titles, categories, and tags to increase relevancy in search engines. Note that this technique is losing ground in SEO as other things are more important.
got it. Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to respond!
Thanks for the great work on Tags and Categories, I has helped me understand a lot better.
I’m still not totally understanding.
I came to site to figure out how to fix some broken tags 404 (not found) lots of them.
These were found when Google was crawling the site, they looked like this [edited]
Now how would I fix that? It has a feed on the end.
I removed the link as the site reports in the browsers as suspicious and I don’t want to scare folks who might click through. This is a redirected Feedburner feed that is broken. If you are using Feedburner as a feed replacement service, please check your account and update the information there and on your site. I recommend you replace whatever you are using to replace your site’s feeds with Feedburner with a new or updated Feedburner WordPress Plugin. As for what Google does, who knows, but it is more important that you either convert to the native feeds of WordPress or get your Feedburner account fixed.
Lorelle,
How do I place tags at the end of my post. they are now appearing right above my article. Thanks, MP
Prices and selling things on WordPress.com sites is against their terms of service. If you are having an issue with odd content on your WordPress.com site, contact the WordPress Support Forum for help as they have more time to dig into this with you. Thanks.
Would more easy to copy and paste tags.
I’m not sure I understand what you are saying. Having copied and pasted site-search tags into WordPress posts for years, typing them into the tag post form is much easier. Or are you talking about writing them in a text editor and pasting them in? Either way, they need to be written first, or selected from a list, which WordPress offers with their auto-suggestion and most commonly use tags.
I got it. Thanks.
Sorry to be commenting on an older post, but looks like you are still answering comments/questions on it, so I’ll give it a try here!
As a newbie to blogging and to WordPress.com, I am quite appreciative of your several informative posts regarding tagging and categories, Lorelle. Your well-written post explaining, in simple terms, the difference between categories and tags (e.g., Categories versus Tags What’s the Difference and Which One) is what finally helped me understand, prompting me to spend a couple of hours “cleaning up” my blog by converting some categories into tags.
I was quite pleased with myself, until I discovered that unlike the “category cloud”, the “tag cloud” (the WordPress built-in widget that comes with the “Dusk to Dawn” theme I use) does not offer the ability to change preferences. Because I am unable to adjust the minimum and maximum font size, my tag cloud looks horrible (take a look for yourself). The “category cloud” looks acceptable because the widget provided the ability to change the range of font sizes to use.
Unless I can figure out a way to tame my ugly tag cloud, the only option I have to is convert all the tags back into categories. Any advice on how I might change the font size range? (I’ve come across other posts talking about plug-ins as means of producing “pretty” clouds, but I don’t see any mechanism for installing a plug-in within my blog’s admin section??) Remember, my blog is “.com”, not “.org”, with all the associated constraints, etc. Any of your sage advice would be most appreciated!
First, never apologize for leaving a comment, no matter how old the post. 😀 You never know how often a post may be updated as only the original publish date is displayed.
The Category Cloud is available for most WordPress Themes on WordPress.com, so it is not unique to that Theme.
As you develop your site and add content, the clouds will change as well.
Before you make any decisions about which work better or worse, have you considered the needs of your audience. Standardization is a list of categories and a tag cloud. Most tag clouds feature font sizes based upon the number of posts with that tag. This is a clue to readers to inform them about the subjects you blog about. The larger the word, the more likely it represents your specialty. If they are out of sorts, consider adding content within that tag or category.
I looked at your site and I see nothing wrong with your tag cloud, though your category “cloud” looks odd as it doesn’t look like a category list, which is an important table of contents directory list. Give it time and more content and things may improve.
Many get obsessed with design elements that are “normal” to the rest of us. Focus on the big picture, serving your readers with standards and familiar navigation options.
Thanks for the quick reply, Lorelle! I very much appreciate the helpful suggestions and your feedback after looking at my tag cloud. I obviously need to re-think what constitutes a category list (darn, just when I thought I understood what distinguished it from a tag list!). And yes, I am finding myself getting obsessed with distinguishing between “tags” and “categories”, to the point that I need to be really careful because this obsession could encroach on the joy of writing. Cheers!
Categories are your table of contents, tags are your index words. Think that way and it should make sense. Good luck with it.
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Exclellent article and helped a lot to understand Tags.
I am looking to try and understand and find a taxonomy for Tags. I have a taxonomy sorted for categories but need a tag taxonomy to complement that.
I really do not want to manage tags manually and read about how you can provide a link for tags. I thought that it might be possible to provide category and tags at the foot of a blog post automatically?
At the moment, my site has not got any categories or tags being placed automatically.
Any idea how to do this please?
Cheers
Terry Bradley
Tags are not added automatically or automagically. You have to add them yourself. Sounds like you are making this harder than it needs to be. Check out Cleaning Up Post Tags with WordPress Bulk Edit.
While there might be a WordPress Plugin that will do this for you automatically, I would not trust it. These are things that are organically and instinctively developed. Remember, it is your site, your life, your business, your online personality and reputation. Make it matter.
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