My question is simple. Are tagging blog post important? When I say important it has two areas:

  1. Is it important for users using the website.
  2. Is it important for SEO?

For instance let's say I write a blog post about how amazing of a browser Internet Explorer 8 is...I might use tags such as Internet Explorer IE8 etc.

Do these really have any impact on my site?

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    For SEO, tags add some keywords to your pages. – Zistoloen May 4 '14 at 20:43

I came across the direct answer to this from Matt Cutts in a Google Webmaster Video.

He basically says tagging isn't really worth it because Google is smart enough to see the keywords in the blog article. He went on to say that he doesn't use tags for his blog.

With that said he did recommend adding categories instead of tags. This would allow the user to easily filter the various categories on the site and allow them to find what they are looking for.

For more info watch the video

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  • This. Functionally, there is little difference between one type of taxonomy and another for the end users and Google doesn't pay a ton of attention to tags thanks to stuffing spamming. You could have everything under one category and use tags to differentiate posts/nav or use categories for everything and not gain or lose all that much. The real benefit to a sane tagging system is to allow end users to filter and find relevant and related content once on the site and that helps with Google in other ways. – JCL1178 May 16 '14 at 18:32

Straight away my answer is "YES" it is. More than I say Important, I will say "IT IS USEFUL".

  1. Tags are like streets name of a village. It makes easy for a postman to understand the route
  2. SEO role in tags are like GPS. It will guide easily to your blog

If you don't want to give importance to an article, than no need of tag.

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  • I didn't really understand your point 2., please could you explain it more precisely? – Zistoloen May 4 '14 at 20:41
  • Dear Zistoloen, My second point indicates: GPS (Global Positioning System) help us to find the right path. As like, Lables help to find right article. – Shah May 5 '14 at 15:01

I am going to answer this question as if you are using WordPress as your blogging platform of choice, because I use it myself and I have seen results from the tag system of using it.

Is it important?

It depends. Do you want to sit there and tag your blog articles as you write them? If your site already has a lot of traffic, then maybe not so much? If you want a lot of new traffic, and to grow even further, yes. It depends on how you view it and what your site is about.

Is it important for SEO?

From my experiences of having a blog, without using tags for a year, I noticed small growth with my site. I had to advertise and give out direct links to get people to join.

Once I added tags and did some SEO work on my site, I noticed a lot more search engine traffic coming to view my articles and posts. I am going to say yes to this question of yours, it can be important for SEO.

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  • You say "Once I added tags and did some SEO work..." So can you tie the growth to just having tags or did your optimization really drive results? – JCL1178 May 16 '14 at 18:25

Yes and Yes.

Keyword stuffing aint what it used to be, but if you still want to emphasize one keyword the tag can do that, more importantly the use of the same tag over and over will create the tag archive pages and let a plugin like YARPP know which posts are related.

I like YARPP, there are other similar plugins/tools/services but if you do a good job of tagging your content YARPP will do a good job of recommending more content to your readers.

Why no link or any buttons on StackExchange like there is on StackOverflow? Here is a link to YARPP, I've never used the Pro version...


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  • YARPP and similar plugins are very good but require a fair amount of overhead. When you have 100 posts, no problem. Over 5,000 and you will start to see some performance issues due to those plugins. – JCL1178 May 16 '14 at 18:34
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    I had over 1000 posts but I agree performance is something most people don't think about, they just add feature after feature, plugin after plugin until they have a big bloated mess of a website. My secret is not to become popular, then you can have a lot of content that almost no one cares about. – Muskie May 16 '14 at 18:56

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