How Important Are Tags For SEO

5 Minutes

If you want to improve the visibility of your website, increase traffic and boost your brand’s revenue, you need to run an SEO campaign.

While developing your social media presence and other off-site practices are great for boosting your site’s rankings, on-page optimisation is very important. Arguably, one of the most important aspects of on-page SEO is tags. Whether it’s title tags, header tags, meta tags or blog post tags, they have been demonstrated to increase traffic and boost engagement.

So why do we have tags for SEO?

In short, tags are a means of defining and differentiating data. When we strip back all the fancy graphic design away, the internet is made up of basic mark-up that renders headlines as big, paragraphs as small, and so on for every type of formatting.

Tags are generally used to classify content in a way that is useful for the reader and easy for search engines to understand, which potentially makes them incredibly important for both SEO and usability.

This simple language makes it so that search engines can understand what each tag means, while at the same time making it easy for us humans to find what they’re looking for on a page.

Over time, certain tags have been introduced to provide additional data such as text that doesn’t show on the page, but does appear in search engine results. These are called meta tags. Certain meta tags have been phased out of the SEO world, while some of them can still come in handy from time to time. Therefore, you can basically ignore them as far as pure SEO is concerned.

With that in mind, let’s have a look at the most relevant tags and why they are so important.

Title Tags

The title tag is the text displayed above the description of your page in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP’s). This tag plays a very important role in SEO because it sets the tone for the type of content readers can expect to find. By definition, it is the title of each page and it should be as descriptive as possible. The more detailed you are, the better your SEO results will be.

When it comes to title tags, there are several best practices you should follow:

  • Place your keywords early in the title.
  • Refrain from ‘cramming’ your titles full of keywords.
  • Set unique title tags for each of your pages.
  • Branding information (such as your website’s name) should appear at the end of your title tags, if at all.
  • Keep your tags between 55-60 characters long, or they might not display in their entirety on SERPs.

By Following these general guidelines for your title tags you will improve your SEO and make for a better user experience, since people will know exactly what they’re in for as soon as they click on any of your results.

How important are title tags for SEO?

Title tags continue to play an important role in on-page SEO and their most important SEO contribution may be the way they impact click-through rates on SERPs. If you adopt best practices for your title tags, your click-through rate should rise accordingly.

You will also want to pay attention to using keywords appropriately in your titles. Recent studies show that even very brief optimisation efforts make a big difference when it comes to appearing in results for your desired keywords.

Header Tags

Header tags are used throughout websites to separate sections of content and establish visual hierarchies. They go in order from Heading 1 (H1), Heading 2 (H2), all the way down to Heading 6 (H6). These types of tags don’t show up in SERPs, but they are important when it comes to calculating your page rank. The main difference when it comes to title and header tags is that each page should only have one title tag, whereas you can use as many header tags as you like.

How important are header tags for SEO?

Header tags continue to play an important role in structuring content for both usability and SEO. It is important to remember that header tags should be used to organise content in a way that makes sense to the reader. If your visitors can scan your content with ease and understand what topics you’re dealing with by your headers alone, a search engine will likely be able to do the same.

Finally, it’s worth noting that well-structured content may also help lower your bounce rate since it contributes to a better user experience. This doesn’t directly impact your SEO, but it is a great bonus.

Blog Post Tags

Blog post tags aren’t actually a part of HTML, but a way of organising blog posts within your Content Management System (CMS). They do not influence on-page SEO in the same way that headers and titles do.

Categories offer a similar CMS-based method to manage your blog posts. Typically, you should organise your posts into a few large categories, and then choose tags to create specific connections to those categories. For example, if you blog about shoes, you could set boots and trainers as categories. Then, you might use tags for red or white items, regardless of their parent category.

While each CMS handles the output of tags and categories differently, it’s always a good idea to organise your content thoroughly. If you take the time to create logical relationships between tags and categories, search engines will have a better chance of making the same semantic connections.

Finally, it is worth remembering that blog tags and categories do not influence on-page SEO in the same straightforward way that headers and titles do.

How important are blog post tags for SEO?

Blog post tags don’t affect SEO in a directly. They play a bigger role when it comes to semantic optimisation, which is more open to interpretation than regular on-page SEO.

To put it simply, blog post tags and categories add a way to internally link to your website. They enable you to establish a site-wide hierarchy that helps improve navigation, and aids search engines in understanding what your site is about. Even if you build a great structure using tags and categories, you still need to optimise the content of each page using best practices if you want to improve your SERP ranking.

Finally, be careful not to misuse your categories and tags or you may end up creating a confusing experience for your user. While the tags in question may not impact SEO directly, a bad user experience is almost certain to lead to bad results.

In conclusion, tags are an important part of SEO so don’t ignore them Title and header tags remain crucial for a strong SEO campaign. On the other hand, post tags and categories don’t work in the same way, which makes them a bit harder to pin down. However, they are still critical to developing a good user experience, which is almost always beneficial from a SEO standpoint. The more well-put together your site is, the more traffic you’re likely to attract.

If you have any questions or get in touch with Wish if you need help with your SEO project, we would be more than happy to help.

View