Labelling blog posts with tags

Typically you will organize posts with categories, but WordPress also provides a way to tie together posts when you have words or phrases which would not make good categories. Using tags, you can:

• emphasize featured words or phrases used in your content
• use words or phrases that do not appear in your content
• link posts together in groups without using your main category structure

You can think of tags as micro-categories that can relate many posts to each other - sort of like creating a list of 'keywords' for your content.

For example, perhaps you create blog posts relevant to specific geographic locations - you might use tags to feature "New York City" and "Central Park". These probably wouldn't make sense as categories for someone who posts about lots different places, because there would be too many categories after a while. But using tags, you have a list of tags appear automatically before/after your content, each linking visitors to all content sharing the "New York City" tag, for example.

You will want to make sure you use tags correctly and not create multiple variations for SEO purposes. Search engines are smart enough to detect similar tags and will often skip indexing tag archive pages that have similar names and/or lots of duplicate content. So creating and applying multiple variations of tags with similar names is not worth the time or effort (e.g. "New Richmond Chapel Weddings," "Chapel Weddings at New Richmond," "Weddings at New Richmond Chapel").

Create a tag

You can create new tags in two places:

• “Posts > Tags” found to the left in WordPress
• “Tags” pane found in the post editor screen

The tags manager is the most flexible area to create tags. Simply type in a name and click to Add New Tag – all other fields may be left blank.

You can specify a specific slug if you use permalinks & slug addresses, but WordPress will create one for you automatically based on the name.

When creating a post, you should find a tags pane where you can add any tags you like. As you type if a tag exists already you will be giving the opportunity to click on it. For a new tag press return to apply it right away.

View and link tags

Each tag you create will have its own special address – you can click to view the content sharing the same tag from the “Posts Tags” screen. Only the content which has that tag will be shown on the page.

You may also use ProPhoto to link to tag archive pages in a variety of ways

• Use links & menus - Use the custom link type and paste in the direct urls to tag archives pages. Access your tag archive pages from "Posts Tags".
• Use the tag cloud widget - This is a standard WordPress widget that can be added in the "Appearance > Widgets" area of WordPress. Then you can add to ProPhoto using a widget module to add it to a layout.
• Use a tag cloud block in a post/page - The block editor has a "tag cloud" block that you can add.
  
  
• Use a plugin - Find a plugin in "Plugins Add New" that gives more styling options for the default widget or makes more types of tag widgets available.