WordPress tags and meta tags are two separate things.
WordPress tags are similar to categories and are a way for your users to navigate and classify posts, like categories, when you tag something and nothing else has been tagged, then a new tag archive page is created for that term. If a page exists then the post will show up in that terms page.
The difference between categories and tags, are categories are defined and hierarchical while tags, are associated loose groupings the fancy term for tags is Folksonomies.
You don’t have to use tags, some people use tags, others use categories, some do both. From a search engine perspective, the generating lots of pages can some times be a problem, so it’s worth reading up about peoples opinions on the subject and how to handle them.
Meta Tags on the other hand, appear in the head of the page, they were designed to help robots identify what the content was about. However they are not as far as I know used by any major search engine these days. So really are just there for a sake of completeness and historical context, along with the odd search engine still using them.
Hope that makes sense
Thanks Tim! That’s a great answer to my question. I will no longer waste my time with tags, since I have categories.
What about the alternative text for photos? I don’t normally caption my photos. So would the alternative text help search engines find the photos when people search for images.
You wandering dangerously into general SEO questions, probably best suited by someone far more knowledgable then me however image alt tags have a very important purpose and that is for anyone using a screen reader (a piece of software that reads the content on the screen) will hear the Alt tag when they get to an image.
Depending on what your site is, where you live, who your audience is you actually might have a legal requirement to make sure your site is accessible as such alt tags should be standard anyway, it’s also just good manners. It’s worth baring in mind, if you leave the alt empty, but leave in alt=”” then people with readers will get something that says “alt tag empty” so if you are not going to use the alt tag make sure you remove it from image tag.
For people searching for images, I believe some search engines make heavy use of both the alt tag and description tags.
I would suggest if you want to go any more in-depth you check out some basic SEO tutorials, Yoast.com and Moz.com are both good beginner level places to start with lots of good material.
Interesting stuff. I never knew all that. Thanks! I’ll have to do more research and take a look at the yoast.com and moz.com.
Pat
