tags what practical use are they

I don’t “do” SEO nor do I worry overly much about SEO (ok, at all). However, from what I’ve seen in the logs I can say that the spiders just seem to LOVE crawling those tag links.
Lord knows, they do it a lot.

I think when used sparingly (ie. not cramming your tags full of everything your blog is about, but keeping a tight-reign on the true relevance) then it can help with interlinking the site and will in turn, help the search engines decide what your true “specialty” is in your topics.

For example, let’s say you’re working on a personal journey about weight loss – and you tag your daily food journals with “calories, food journal, fat grams” and that’s the majority of what you post to the site, then the search engines will conclude that your site mainly relates to “calories” “food journal” and “fat grams” – so yes, it will help in SEO…

However, I do know that the search engines won’t place a HEAVY rely on these. It’ll help, but I don’t think it’ll hurt if you don’t use them, given the nature of WP and how it basically interlinks things by category and such anyway.

There’s a lot to SEO – a LOT. Every little thing you do (or don’t do) has just a small effect either way. So if anyone’s thinking that this will boost your rankings and you won’t have to do anything else, they’re sadly mistaken.

In my company, our motto when working on SEO is “Fly Low Under The Radar” – the less obvious you try to be, the better. And that motto hasn’t failed me in nearly 5 years now… ??

I have to disagree with you, Ladydelaluna. I think tags should be used anything other than sparingly. When I post, I throw every tag that seems to make sense in UTW. Why?
Technorati and Google just love tags. Tags have done more to increase my readership (according to my stats) than anything else. I don’t use tags that don’t make sense, so don’t get me wrong, but I think that any tag that makes sense should be added. In fact, I don’t even use categories anymore.
Just my 2 cents.

monkeypup – if you’re not using categories, then that WOULD be the only way for you.

and technorati is one thing – it’s not a true search engine, and not something that SEO’s use to garner a site’s popularity as a site. it’s great for a blog community, sure – but it doesn’t really matter when you’re getting into the bare bones of SEO.

besides – just because you’re loving the results right now, doesn’t mean that google, yahoo, and msn won’t catch on to what you’re doing 6, 12, or 18 months from now. but the statement “When I post, I throw every tag that seems to make sense in UTW.” is a dangerous one… mark my words… it’s equivalent to keyword stuffing, and someday it might come back to bite you somewhere much worse than your butt.