Any point in using regular old ‘Tags?’ (I love Sketch!)

Hi John –

Is your site on WordPress.com? If so, those tags would get pulled in to tag searches and tag following lists from our Reader.

Hi Liz,
thanks for replying. It’s a self-hosted site.
john

Hi John,

Tags, and project tags and Project Types for portfolio projects, don’t really have a direct impact on SEO, e.g. they won’t determine under which key words search engines index your site. Search engines get those key words from your post/page titles, permalink slugs, and the content itself.

The different taxonomies exist for the internal organisation of your site, as a way to structure your content, and that can have an indirect SEO benefit. But more importantly, using those, and using them well, makes your site easier to navigate and for visitors to find content. If you use the built-in WordPress search, or the new Jetpack Search feature, those also rely on categories and tags to find content relevant to the words people search for.

So in that regard I’d say it’s worth using them. Just be careful of duplication – if you already have a project tag for a particular term, don’t use a regular tag for the same term.

In her comment above Liz mentioned the WordPress.com Reader – I just want to clarify that that only applies to posts, not portfolio projects or pages, and also only Jetpack-connected sites with a paid plan are eligible for inclusion in tag listings in the Reader. However, tags do have an effect on how your posts are indexed in the normal Reader Search.

This is not theme-specific, by the way ??

Hi Kokkie,

Thanks for all of that advice. I have a search plug-in on my site…

https://johnwhiteillustrator.com

…but it’s ‘Ivory Search.’ Interesting that the other search plug-ins you mentioned look at tags, project tags, project types.

I can understand how not using the same names for tags and project tags could be a problem. Google for example might see it as spammy SEO trickery?

…but it’s ‘Ivory Search.’ Interesting that the other search plug-ins you mentioned look at tags, project tags, project types.

Ivory Search does also look at taxonomies like categories and tags, based on the description on the plugin page.

I can understand how not using the same names for tags and project tags could be a problem. Google for example might see it as spammy SEO trickery?

Where search engines will have a problem is when you have multiple archive pages on the site for the same terms. They don’t care so much about the tags themselves, as that’s an internal WordPress thing, but if you have a tag page and a project tag page with the same term, that might be considered duplicate content, especially if you have the same projects listed in each.

If you search online for “WordPress taxonomies SEO” you’ll find many articles that go into this in more detail, should you be interested.