Do tags in Wordpress help for SEO or hose keyword density?

Lets look at a good example... Techcrunch Crunchbase replaced their old tag system but is still being used as tag space. Each "tag" is based on a very specific taxonomy, either a company or a person. It is very useful for visitors, pulls up a nice widget based upon the tags, and links to what is often a very useful page about a particular company or person. Each "tag" page on Crunchbase gets multiple links not just from techcrunch but other sites who can use the widgets, send a trackback, ad also themselves get a listing in Crunchbase for what they write. Mashable still uses almost conventional WordPress tag pages and those pages do still rank, but again in a very constructive manner. At the other extreme you have auto-tagging plugins that pull almost random words by API. One of the primary reasons I have used tags in the past is to get more links from scrapers, and to funnel more juice away from pages that are leaking lots of juice from "dofollow" comments. I do have evidence to suggest Google doesn't like indexing multiple taxonomies.

From my experience, they help alot. They don't hose keyword density, and keyword density is a deprecated concept nowadays. The useful thing that they do is the fact that they create a new url with the tag name, thus giving more weight on the keyword. Yes btw you need to be careful with duplicate content, even if you don't though, I think the benefits outmatch the con of dup content. A great SEO expert would try to find a pattern that works, not much duplicate content but still good tags.

The keyword tag is obsolete. When you use the Meta Keyword Tag, the search engines don't even use it and you are serving up your keywords to your competitors. All they have to do is look at your code, view that tag, and then add your keywords to their own keyword strategy. Content keywords are another story. You definitely want to use keywords within your content throughout your website. We are not talking about keyword density so much as we are talking about long-tail strong keywords throughout the copy. Google is blind and you need keywords to convey your niche, industry, products, and services. If you didn't have keywords, Google would not know how to serve your website up on the search engine results page. Here are a few articles to further explain keywords: https://shannonksteffen.com/seo-tip-content-is-king/ https://shannonksteffen.com/where-to-use-seo-keywords-for-best-results/ https://shannonksteffen.com/best-free-seo-keyword-tools/ Hope that helps!

I agree with Allen. I don't worry about keyword density, but use tags when it will make the site more browsable for users. Generally I'm only using these in the blog area, because my other pages are in the navigational structure, but I also build sites in which I use custom post types and multiple custom taxonomies. I like to think of categories and tags as I would sections in a department store. One might have categories for meat, produce and baked goods. (Like Allen's book chapters) My tags would get more specific and could use words like bacon, lettuce and cupcake. Ideally one would assign a post to one or 2 categories that pertain to the overall theme of the post. Then one would use tags to identify specific topics covered in the post. One shouldn't overstuff them or use too many, but should just choose the ones useful to readers. For example if one had a cooking site and wrote a post with a recipe for gluten-free bacon-maple cupcakes, one might use category: baking, tags: cupcakes, bacon, gluten-free, maple. If my site was limited to baking, my category might be cupcakes and the other tags would remain the same. Then if someone clicked bacon they could find other posts about bacon. Or they could peruse category and tag indexes to explore the vaious topics. Generally I find that if we build our site and focus our content on what will be useful to our target audience, then the SEO will follow. I like to say "Write for humans not robots" and I think the same applies to tags.

If you have a large site with a formal set of categories, tags can be an effective way to diversify your keyword footprint away from the category keywords.  They shouldn't be stems of the category keyword - e.g. plumbing v. plumber, but rather should be terms that perhaps don't merit a main navigational link but still represent some relevant user intent (just reread that and it sure sounds search geeky).  Think of it this way - "bar" is a category and "beer" is a tag.

It's all in how you use 'em. If you have a tag mob of 30-40+ tags on every page there's no way to get benefit. If you use them selectively to create strong 'hubs' around a few specific topics, they can help.

First, you shouldn't be optimizing for keyword density. Secondly, tags are better used for your users, not the search engines. It's a way to help users find information in a manner that is different from categories. For instance, in a textbook you would organize information by chapters and by an index. On a blog or a website, your categories are like chapters in a book and your tags are like index listings. It's just another way to organize the information for easy reference. One way to control how search engines deal with tags and archive pages is to nofollow, noindex them. That way you can avoid duplicate content issues and pass link juice to the pages you really want it to go to so that it doesn't leak out to those low value pages.

Certainly, your blog posts in WordPress can benefit from tags. They help readers know what your most popular topics are, where to find content that relates to a particular topic, and how to navigate the blog. However, tags do not ultimately influence keyword density or SEO.There’s a sentiment that keyword density is an “outdated and simplistic metric”; those who believe this have a point. The way search engines approach keywords continually changes, meaning what worked yesterday is probably obsolete today. Additionally, too many tags and keywords tend to make Google and other search engines “nervous.” They may see your tags as a subtle form of keyword stuffing, which leads to penalties for your site. Knowing this, what is the best way for bloggers to approach SEO so their content gets the rankings it needs? Several opinions exist, but many professionals give the same tips:• Don’t use multiple taxonomies or tags. This creates more work for Google and endangers rankings.• Use tags only when they make the site more user-friendly. For example, only assign 1-2 tags that relate to an overall theme.• Determine your blog’s most frequent keywords, and use these in content rather than tags.• Don’t use variations of the same keyword in a tag (i.e., “plumbing,” “plumber,” “plumbing company”). Try to create posts that, while related to the overall topic of plumbing (or whatever yours is), lend themselves to a variety of keywords and tags.

In my opinion tags helps your readers find more stuff on the subject. I don't believe it makes any difference in SEO or keyword density. But you should not over use tags. It's sort of like categories, but categories are wider subjects and tags are more specific subjects. Google and other bots will crawl your blog no matter what you do anyway. (Unless you set a robots.txt instruction to stay out).