Categories, keywords, tags and traffic

Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 6:50 am

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I am continuing the series of answers to questions that were asked in my pre-Christmas post. You can ask your questions to be added to the series by commenting on this or any other post.

Today’s question:

Would like even more clarity on Tags Vs. Keywords, a Categories vs. Keywords/tags. Which is going to get me traffic from the search engines?

A few questions here and it may be a bit confusing so I have to do one of the bad things – assume. Regular readers know how I hate having to use that word .

Your question is primarily about getting more traffic. Tags, keywords and the categories that you pick can all help you that way in getting traffic from the search engines. Often they may end up being very similar.

Keywords are normally added to your meta tags to help the search engines decide what your page is about but everything I have read of late shows that keywords in the meta tags have very little weight in how the search engines rank your page.

Tags on the other hand as used by WordPress create extra content pages and those tag pages make it very easy to get the spiders deeper into your site and make sure that all of your content is spidered.

Categories also create separate pages within your blog structure like the tags do. Both of these increase your interior linking within your site.

Both categories and tags can increase the chance of you getting a double listing in the search engines for your keyword. According to the tests that the guys at Stomper have done that will increase the click through rate.

Although using tags and categories that are keyword relevant will increase your chances of getting ranked better the real key is the quality of the content you have and the keywords that you have targeted.

To find out how to target traffic generating keywords that will draw you traffic check out EZ Keyword Research.

Using tags properly, adding keywords into your meta tags, and picking good categories of and by them selves will not make a huge difference on a specific post. However, the total weight of doing it regularly on all of your posts over time will make a huge difference.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed. Comment below.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.

After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.

If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.