This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Using Tags
WordPress provides a simple and powerful tagging mechanism for blog posts.
Tags function like mini-categories, providing additional ways for people to find your posts. Tags can also summarize content, which helps search engines determine relevancy.
It is generally a good idea to tag your posts with a few keywords or phrases from the content. So for example, if you write a post about playing tennis with your mother, you might want to tag your post with tennis and mom. To take it a step further, you might want to tag the entry sports, even if you don’t use that word in your post.
Those tags will be saved, and if you publish another post tagged with any of your previously used keywords, readers can click the tag to see other related posts. To continue with our example, if you write a post about a racquetball match with your neighbor and tag it sports, readers who click that tag will see a list of posts that includes the one in which you played tennis with your mother. It’s a great way to link unrelated posts together. Tags don’t have to correspond with categories, so you can use them to fine-tune the way your posts are linked together.
To add tags:
- The easiest method of creating tags is to do it on the fly as you create blog posts using the Post Tags box in the post editor
(Figure 4.14).
Figure 4.14 Enter tags in the Post Tags box and click Add to append them to your post.
Replace the text Add New Tag with your new tag and click Add to add it to your post.
- Add multiple tags all at once by separating them with commas in the list (Figure 4.15).
Figure 4.15 Separate multiple tags with commas.
- To choose from tags you’ve used in previous posts, click the “Choose from the most used tags in Post Tags” link to expand
the list of tags (Figure 4.16). As you click the tag names, you will see them appear in the Add New Tag box; click Add to attach them to your post.
Figure 4.16 You can choose from your most used tags in the list at the bottom.
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- Themes implement tags in various ways, but a typical example is the default WordPress theme. Each post has a list of tags in the meta-information at the bottom. When you click a tag on any post, you will see a filtered listing of blog posts that match that tag (Figure 4.17).
Figure 4.17 Blog posts that have been tagged “lorem.”
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To manage tags:
- In the sidebar menu, click Posts, and then select Post Tags to open the window shown in Figure 4.18.
Figure 4.18 All of your tags will be listed here. You can input a new tag using the fields on the left.
You’ll see a list of your most commonly used tags at the top, and a list of all your tags on the right. You’ll input new tags just below your most commonly used tags.
- In the Add a New Tag section, enter a new tag in the Tag name field. The only required field is the tag name.
- A slug, or URL-friendly version of the tag name, will be generated automatically when you click Add Tag. If you want to use a specific URL string, enter it in the Tag Slug field.
- You can also add a description for your tag. Most themes won’t show this, but it can be useful for your own organizational
purposes.
New tags will appear in the list to the right (Figure 4.19).
Figure 4.19 Now that you’ve entered a new tag, you’ll see it in the list on the right.
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- From this management screen, you can also remove tags that are no longer relevant to your site by selecting them and choosing Delete from the Bulk Actions drop-down menu (Figure 4.20). You must click Apply to delete the tags.
Figure 4.20 Set Bulk Actions to Delete and click Apply to delete selected tags.
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