WordPress is currently the world’s most popular content management system (CMS), which is a fancy say of saying it’s a platform for building websites. If you have a blog on your WordPress site, you can label the posts with different categories and tags. These are ways to sort the articles into taxonomies, so people can find more articles on the same topic quickly and efficiently.

However, one way that I’ve seem many people using tags in WordPress is for a mythical SEO boost.

The logic being, if they tag an article with a whole bunch of words and phrases, then the article will have a better chance of ranking in search results.

I’m here to completely dispel that myth. WordPress tags have no effect on SEO, or the ranking of a given article.

I’m not sure when this practice started, or how this rumor came about originally. Personally, I’ve been seeing people using this technique for many years, but alas, it doesn’t do anything to the ranking of your blog post. All it does is create clutter and make it more difficult for your reader to actually use WordPress tags the way they were intended.

To make a page rank, you have to mention the words you are trying to rank for in the main content of the article. I would also recommend using the main keyword in the title of the post, and in some of the subheadlines. Google will also look for other words that are associated with the main keyword phrase that you are trying to rank for.

For all you Yoast SEO users, here’s a tip: I index my category pages and noindex my tag pages. This is to prevent duplicate content, and forcing Google to choose between a category and a tag page for which one is most relevant.

To sum up, WordPress tags do not influence SEO. If you want to rank for a given search phrase, use that in the title, meta description, body of the article, the H1 (main headline), and subheadlines (H2, H3, H4, H5, H6).