Tags are important to use on every blog post because it not only provides your users with an idea of what your post is related to, but blog crawlers like technorati and wordpress pick up the tags from your posts and index them so they appear within their search results pages when people look for posts based on their tag searches.

By default, if you had a tag page called, “celebrity” (ie. www.yourblog.com/tag/celebrity) its title tag simply appears as, “celebrity” – and all the posts holding that tag would appear in it. However, when optimizing pages, its a good idea to try to capture long-tail searches (when its appropriate) – meaning searches that use the keyword in the keyphrase, ie. “Celebrity Gossip” or “Celebrity Photos”, etc.

Now lets say, your blog is about Hollywood; actors, actresses, celebrities, etc. You may want to have the tags, “Actor”, “Actress”, “Celebrity” and so on. So if you wanted to optimize those pages for long-tail search results, modify your header.php template file in your wordpress control panel as follows:


<title><?php if( is_tag()) { single_tag_title(); ?> | <?php single_tag_title(); ?> Photos, Videos, Appearances, News - Hollywood<?php ; } else { if (function_exists('seo_title_tag')) { seo_title_tag(); } else { bloginfo('name'); } } ?></title>


* This post assumes you have the SEO Title Tag plugin.

So now, if you were to click the Celebrity tag link, its title tag would be:

“Celebrity Photos, Videos, Appearances, News – Hollywood”

Now, your tag page could rank for “Celebrity Photos”, “Celebrity Video”, “Celebrity Appearances”, “Celebrity News” – just for starters.