??? The Value of Tags ???

[jkgourmet]

We've had this discussion before. And I haven't a clue whether or not tags add any SEO value. I do believe they add a value for navigation for the reader.

But just to add fuel to the fire, these recent items came to my attention:

Yahoo drops the Meta Keyword Tag

Sorry, Yahoo, you do index the meta keyword tag

[Lynn Terry]

The Keyword Meta Tag is HTML code in the header of your web pages - which is different than WordPress tags used on blogs.

[jkgourmet]

Shows how much I know. Sorry if I caused further confusion.

[Lynn Terry]

No worries - I'm just now testing out WordPress tags and should have some data to share on that in the next 3-6 weeks.

[brad]

I try to put 3-5 tags on each Wordpress post and I've found that I do get a bunch of traffic to my tag pages, ie. "www.wigdetcentral.com/tag/blue-widgets/"

[DianaWalker]

I've been using tags on http://www.diana1.com for a few posts recently and if you do a Google Search for
Calli Tea
You'll see I'm at 3 and 4 for my http://www.diana2.com site which is a website not a blog (which has had high rankings for a long time now), and my www.diana1.com Wordpress site is moving up also. Then if you look at about position 25, you will see that the Google ranking mentions:
Even though it has been almost 13 years now since I sipped my first delicious cup of Sunrider Calli Tea, and enjoyed my first Sunrider NuPlus, ...
diana1.com/tag/free-samples-of-sunrider-calli-tea/ - Cached - Similar

So - you can see here where it has ..../tag/..... and that is the only time I have used that particular tag so far on any of my sites.

So it seems that there is significance placed on Wordpress tags.
I was getting confused between "keywords" and "tags" and the differences, still am not really clear...

I'll be interested to see how Lynn figures this out for us!

Diana

[Lynn Terry]

Keyword Phrases are used to optimize your web pages, and are generally placed in these common places: the file name, the Title Tag, the text header, within the content, and as anchor text in inbound links to that page.

With a blog, the keyword phrases are used in the Post Title, the permalink, within the content area, and as anchor text in inbound links to that post.

WordPress Tags are an opportunity to tag a blog post with relevant keywords and phrases, and create a means of searching on a micro-topical level. Categories are similar except that they are more broad in terms of topical search.

As an example, I am using the tag "video" for any post that contains video on my blog. This allows readers to specifically search for videos at ClickNewz that may not otherwise use the word video in the title or post:

http://www.clicknewz.com/tag/video/

I have just started using Tags on my blog in the last couple of weeks, so I am giving Google a chance to crawl and index the various tags - and I am still going back through my archives to add in relevant tags to posts. So it will take some time yet before I can share legitimate results.