WordPress is not Instagram. Nobody is going to be disagreeing with me on that, right? We all understand that WordPress is different from Instagram. But why do so many people use tags like we use hashtags on Instagram? And why should those people stop doing that – immediately?
#hashtag Instagram
A hashtag on Instagram is beneficial for your Instagram post’s visibility and findability. If you add a popular hashtag to your photo, people searching on that hashtag could find your post. I always add as many hashtags as possible to my Instagram posts. #familiyof6 #ladyboss #SEO #businessowner #entrepeneur
While hashtags are beneficial for the findability and visibility of your posts on Instagram, tags do the exact opposite in WordPress. Adding tags to a post leads to creating tag pages for all these tags. WordPress does that automatically for you. Thank you so much, WordPress :-). As a result of that, you end up with many empty tag pages, which is devastating for the findability of your website in search engines.
Why do we add so many tags?
Are you also guilty of adding those tags to your posts in WordPress? Don’t feel bad. Everybody seems to do it. The question is: why do we add so many tags???
I think Instagram is partly to blame. We got used to using hashtags in a certain way because of Instagram. Perhaps that influenced our thinking about tags. Our brains got wired so that adding a lot of (hash) tags is linked to it being beneficial to the visibility of your posts. We started adding those tags to our WordPress posts without giving it too much thought.
Another reason for our blown-out-of-proportion love of tags is probably because WordPress encourages users to add tags, too. Before you publish a post, WordPress will nudge you to add a tag. That nudge will make people think adding some tags is a good idea. If WordPress advises you to do something before publication, you’ll do it. That makes total sense.
Why is adding tags in WordPress a bad thing?
We’ve established that our love for Instagram and our WordPress backend nudge us to add tags to our posts. But why is this bad?
Well, adding tags is not necessarily a bad thing. Adding too many tags is a bad thing. In WordPress, tags are meant to add structure to your blog posts. If you have many blog posts, it can be challenging for visitors and Google to find their way around your website. How do you find a post about a particular topic? Where can I read more about something? Both categories and tags are taxonomies designed to help structure your site. They should help visitors and Google find the content they want to read.
However, tags are only good if they help structure your site. Tags should bundle posts concerning the same topic together. But if you add a tag to a post and only use that tag once, you’ll create another page (a tag page) and not bundle anything together. You’ll just add yet another page to your site. Another page for Google to crawl through. That is the exact opposite of adding structure. That tag page is useless for users as it only contains that one article with that one specific tag.
Adding tags is a bad thing because we overdo it entirely. We have no boundaries; we’re out of control in using tags. We’re using tags in a way they’re not meant to be used.
So what now?
WordPress is not Instagram. Tags are not Hashtags. We’re not using WordPress the way we’re using Instagram and should stop using tags like hashtags. Use tags, but use them less often. Use fewer tags!