One of the major problems that I have seen among trainees and people who have entered the field of SEO is the lack of proper understanding of the label and how to properly label the created content.
If you also think:
- The tag is the keyword.
- Lots of tags will help your content grow.
- The text must have tags.
- The label must be the same as the category name.
- Tag is the introduction of the keyword to Google!
I invite you to read this article completely.
Table of Contents
What is a tag (in WordPress)?
The tags section is one of the sections that content management systems provide you by default, so that you can connect different categories and guide the user to find similar and related articles among a multitude of Guide articles. (Of course, tagging has a meaning outside of content management systems and is not specific to a system like WordPress.)
What is the difference between label and category?
Tags are basically categories or more precisely guides that relate different categories. For example, the article you are currently reading is in the SEO training category, but since it is in the field of technical SEO, I may decide to link it to the SEO technical training category through the appropriate tag, so that the user I have access to more articles in this field. (assuming an example)
Labeling requirements
1) The number of labels
The number of tags in an article should not be large, as it was said that the purpose of tagging is to guide users to similar articles (topics that are mentioned in the article), a large number of tags has three main drawbacks:
- The high number of tags confuses your users and spoils the user experience.
- Be careful that every site has an index budget from Google and Google bots allocate a certain time to your site for this. By tagging too much, you will spend your index budget on new and less valuable pages, and your main and important pages will be out of this circle.
- The increase of zombie pages is another big drawback for your website‘s SEO, which is a direct result of unnecessary and excessive tagging, pages that only contain one article and do not add any value to your site. (A hundred blessings to pages 404!)
2) Short and useful label
Another common tagging mistake I’ve seen is long tagging and one-dimensional sentences; in such a way that it can no longer be used for other topics and articles.
Your tags should finally be a combination of two or three words, in a way that is in line with your content strategy and can be used further.
I will explain this section with an example:
Let’s say you have uploaded an article on “Digital Marketing Education” on your website and mentioned topics such as SEO, Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing.
What to do for labeling?
Suppose I have articles on the subject of digital marketing training that were written for you, on the site, or I plan to upload those contents on the site according to my content plan and strategy. So it’s better to use the above words (if it’s not my category name) as a tag.
By doing this, after reading the article and clicking on these tags, the user enters a page where other articles have been written about these topics.
Note that the use of previous and different tags with the names of the categories is also one of the correct tagging requirements.
Wrong tagging and damage to SEO site
In addition to the mentioned zombie page spread, wrong tagging has two other big disadvantages and can cause your SEO site a big problem.
1) Repetitive content production
If your tags have the same content, your site will face a big problem called duplicate content.
For example, consider the same digital marketing training article. If one of my tags is “site seo” and one of my tags is “site seo improvement”, my content will effectively be published on two pages with the same theme. This issue is considered the same issue as duplicate content from the point of view of Google and will harm your site’s SEO.
2) Cannibalization
It may have happened to you that you have two results with a keyword in Google search, for example, your landing page and one of your tag pages under the word “SEO training in Toronto” rank 3 and 9 in Google results!
This issue may be considered a good achievement at the beginning and a superficial look at it, but remember that you could have link 1. (Where is the click rate of link 1 and links 3 and 9!)
This is cannibalization, which we will discuss in the next articles and how to fix this problem.
Using the same tag as the title of the article may create this problem for you, and your two pages will compete with each other in Google pages, which will end up being detrimental to you.
How to correct wrong labeling?
You may accept a project where the employer or the previous SEO team has affected the performance of the site without a proper understanding of the tag with wrong tagging. As an SEO specialist, you must first recognize the important tags and use their potential to connect pages to each other. In the next step, you have 2 main ways to remove the wrong tags:
1) Remove tags
The easiest way for an SEO expert is to remove the tag pages, be careful that your tag will be redirected to the 404 page by default.
If you have a personalized and high-quality 404 page, this will not be a big problem for you.
2) Redirect 301 or use canonical
Another way to eliminate these extra tags and zombie pages is to redirect them to related pages and articles. You can also use canonical rel for this.
Personal experience: I myself use 301 redirect to remove wrong tags.