WordPress is a wonderful blogging platform that is very versatile and flexible. One of its features is ‘tagging’ where you can add certain ‘tags’ to posts. The purpose of this is to organise your content based around certain themes, categories or keywords that your content may fall under.
Tags are also picked up and indexed as separate pages in Google so this is an added benefit for search engine optimisation reasons. So if for example you add 10 tags to a single post, all ten of these tags are likely to be indexed.
So how do we add them? After logging into your administration panel, you want to head for the section where you create new posts. This can be found under Posts > Add New. Once you enter your main heading, content and categories, you want to add all tags you feel are relevant to the page copy you are adding.
You can separate each one using a comma. Once done, simply click on ‘Add’ and they should all appear underneath. If you want to add existing tags that have already been added in previously then simply click on the hyperlink ‘Choose from the most used tags in Post Tags’, this will bring up a list of all tags in a ‘cloud’ format. The larger the text, the more popular it is.
If you want to just add tags without adding any content, then this can be done by going to the option Posts > Post Tags. You are then presented with a screen where you can add a new Tag, slug and a short description. This allows you to populate the system with those that you feel may be used moving forward.
One word of caution though, one must remember never to get too carried away, using too many can be seen as spam is used incorrectly. Always make sure that what you are ‘tagging’ is absolutely relevant to your content. From personal experience, I have found that using only a few help your rankings and in does not dilute your PageRank.
