Tags, why do I need them>?

Maybe you don’t need them. It’s your site. What do you want on it?

Oh hi! The blog is brand new and I would like to get some readers to it. I thought that tags help readers find you. Is that correct?

I do have categories in place.

Tags are sometimes helpful, they’re trendy too. There are some nice essays if you search, for the difference between tags & categories, you might’ve already read something about that.

Ultimate Tag Warrior is a popular tag plugin

SimpleTagger is another, I think that’s the name.

But the word-is, WP is adding Tags to WP itself (no plugin required) in the new version 2.3 that should come out in September or sometime. You might just want to get started on your site now, planning to add Tags later. Or grab a tag plugin and start tagging — WP will probably import the ones you come up with now, but I don’t know that for sure yet.

HI and thank you. Now, will tags help get visitors to my site?

Tags help to categorize your posts with sites like Technorati, so yes, they may provide a benefit in attracting visitors.

Tag archives on your blog itself also provide search engines pages of similar content to index — in addition to simple category archives — which provides yet another entry point for visitors.

The way I look at it, categories & tags work together quite well.

Categories are like folders. Say you have these folders: Current Events, Technology, Meta, and Sports.

Those are broad; tags let you get more specific and allow you to connect content posted in one category with content in another.

For instance, you might have posts in the Technology cat about WordPress plugin releases you are interested in. Such posts may be tagged “WordPress, plugins” or so. And you may also have in your Meta category a post describing the plugins you are currently using on your own blog — again, the same tags would be used.

The depth of organization is entirely up to each user, but having categories & tags together provides a very powerful framework for organization, in my opinion.

Tags are most-likely not the best way to get visitors to your site. Not even Top 10 ways. But they might help with that goal in some small measure.

To get visitors on your site the first thing you need is great content, something people will want to read/see. After that, there are a bunch of techniques for advertising, link exchange, and SEO — any of that might help bring in visitors. Tags would just be 1 aspect of it.

Tags have other different purposes, besides getting visitors to your site.

Thanks for the schooling guys. Just upgraded to WordPress 2.3 and was wondering what tags was all about. No intention to threadjack but, are tags the same as keywords, as defined by the All-In-One SEO plugin?