When used on a Blog, Tags can serve multiple purposes, You can use them to categorize your blog posts, link posts together in a series or set of articles, or use them as a means of promoting your favorite posts.

Think of Tags as Sub level categories or keyword specific links to all posts that contain a specific keyword.

How you initially set up your site will determine how you use Tags.

You can use tags to categorize your posts instead of using sub categories, Or you can use both sub categories and tags to structure and categorize your content.

Tags are especially useful if you write an article that would fit into more than one category or subcategory.

You may notice on this site that I have posts that are in different sub categories but are tagged with similar tags.

The reason is, I could of potentially placed the post in at least two categories, but I had to decide which was the most suitable category at the time of publishing, so the article is placed in a top level subcategory but assigned to a sub level tag.

To explain that last sentence in a way that someone would actually understand, Just think of tags as sub categories.

Wordpress does allow you to publish a post in more than one category but this is not a very good practice for structuring your site.

Tags are a great use of Keywords.

I have seen many articles listed in the search engines because of the Tag related to the article.

It’s a good Idea not to overdo tags, as they are really a way of categorizing and structuring your content and every time you add a new tag to a post you are potentially adding a new page to your site.

So if every post has a specific tag that is only used once, what you are creating is a new page that may in all likelihood be a duplicate of the original posts page, which may be detrimental to how the search engines view your site.

I recommend using specific tags that relate to specific posts and always try to use a Tag that can be used on multiple posts.

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