I received an email from Jarret Cade who asked me to talk more about tagging and the importance of using tags on your WordPress Blog. Here is a copy of the question he asked:

“Hi Garry, I am in the process of starting up a new niche blog and I had a question for you related to WordPress tags. I am kind of half and half on whether or not I should use them. I know that they can provide visitors with a link to further relevant content and I am semi sure that they help a tiny bit with PageRank if they aren’t nofollowed.

Should I still use the tags even if I don’t have them displayed? I know that they shouldn’t be indexed because of duplicate content issues but I am still wondering what your thoughts on them are. I plan to have categories listed for sure as I want visitors to either leave through an AdSense click, affiliate link or a link to another post/page on the blog.

I guess you could say that the whole logic behind my question is getting your visitors to stick around on your blog instead of viewing a page and then leaving.”

Now I don’t have proof or a source to say how tags originated; however, I can easily relate modern day tagging to how AOL used to do their famous AOL Keywords (They may still do this too, I don’t pay attention to it). Back during AOL’s glory day’s you could easily listen to a radio commercial or even read an article in a magazine and come across a message that said, “To learn more about (fill in the word) visit AOL keyword: (fill in the word).”

The system of tagging gives end users a way of finding information that is loosely related to the current page being viewed. The system of tagging is very clear when you surf more popular sites such as Amazon.com. However, many sites such as a common WordPress blog have tagging systems. Commonly though with smaller sites, such as a common blog, it can be hard to see the big picture of the tagging system due to lack of related content.

On my blog, my most popular tag is make money online. When you visit this tag page, you’ll see that it is filled with an almost endless amount of references to posts I have published that have some kind of logical relation to the term, make money online. However, some lesser popular tags such as search engine ranking only have less then ten articles that are loosely related to that term. Really in theory, the purpose behind tagging is to give end users and even search engines an alternate path towards finding relevant content.

Now, with all that said, I’ll share with you a reason why I use tags. I almost hate myself for sharing information like this, because I keep telling myself that I am going to stop giving away tips like this as if it were candy.

Another great reason why you should use tags, especially on your WordPress blog, is the fact that it creates a free search engine friendly web page based off the content found on the actual post page.

What about duplicate content you may ask? Well, duplicate content really isn’t as much of a concern as many people are led to believe. Search engines don’t want you to duplicate the content on external sites. However, search engines do understand that many platforms such as WordPress duplicate internally written content almost out side from the control of the publisher.

In other words, typically, you are not penalized for internal duplicate content. However, again, you can indeed get in a little bit of trouble if you duplicate content that originates from other sites. Internally tagging your own content doesn’t create external duplicate content. What it does do — as mentioned above — is it creates additional pages that will get indexed in the search engines.

More established tags, such as my make money online tag, end up becoming very established. You’ll notice that I display the excerpts from each post on my tag pages. When you deal with popular tags on your blog, these excerpts being displayed on your tag page, soon get recognized as being one big blog page in itself.

Even though the content is duplicated, because you are displayed the excerpts from each post, that basically mashes up the content in a way that can almost be considered original. Needless to say, Google doesn’t seem to mind and in fact, they place quite a bit of value in WordPress tag pages.

If you use tags on your WordPress blog and then check the SERPs in Google as well as other search engines, soon you may start to discover that you land double listings in the SERPs. Commonly, you’ll see your tag page listed and then your post page indented directly below it.

All in all, tagging is designed to give end users an alternate way towards quickly finding information based off the current page they are viewing. Search engine marketers such as myself, also see tagging as a way towards getting more pages indexed in search engines. However, with me, I don’t really abuse this tweak as I make sure that I provide or represent an accurate tagging system.

Keyword stuffing is the practice of purposely placing tons of keywords into the content of their blog post or web page. The same can be done with tagging. Many people abuse their tagging systems and if you do, you can put your blog or web site at risk of getting penalized. All in all, the best practice is to provide your readers with a tagging system that helping them find other articles that are similar to the current one they are reading.

If you do that, then you should have no problems with getting penalized in the search engines. Of course, please make no mistake, I don’t consider myself to be an SEO expert. My strengths are in SEM and I know that tagging helps me build additional pages that feed from my original content. So far to date, I haven’t had any issues with the major search engines.

If you have a quesiton that you would like to have answered live on my blog, contact me and ask me your question. If you provide enough detail and material for me to use, I wil publsih your question, give you credit for asking and answer your question live on my blog.