Tags versus Keywords

[TheDonk]

I know this has been discussed before, but what subject hasn't?

I'm looking for clarity on the best way to do this. Use tags, keywords, both? When you use both they all show up under the source code which looks spammy to me.

Using All-in-One SEO, should I be skipping the keywords and using tags only? Using keywords only?

Opinions?

[CK]

I noindex and no follow my tags, my categories and my archives. Whatever the wordpress spits out twice is removed to avoid any duplicate issues. I dont care what anyone says. I will not have the same article published two or three times on my sites. Use your tags but grab the related posts plugin. THis is probably one of the best tools for the tags. It takes your tags and matchs the posts so at the bottom of a site is other articles which are related to the current one a user is using. If you no index the stuff I mentioned above it will not be in your source code

and use keywords

Edit - I know people will screw up if you try to add a no follow to your categories ( hehe I did when I tried to do it) so if you want to no follow categories/archives/tags go grab the wordpress plugin SEO master. It allows you to customize how you want your no folow links and no index throughout your site right down to page by page

[Nat Arem]

I agree re: tags and related posts. I like that plugin a lot.

However, I believe that you can help your overall link structure by allowing google to index tag pages -- just make sure your tag.php template page doesn't have the_content() in it! Use either a very limited summary or just make it a simple link list with something like date, author, etc to make the page look good. The more organized and relevant your internal link structure is, the better. I don't see the harm in making a list of posts about, say, Online Poker Sites on a page called domain.com/tag/online-poker-sites/ or whatever.

I would, however, recommend changing the tag base -- I think Google might devalue those pages because they know that /tag/ is an autogenerated page with zero original content over 99% of the time.

[Ozpoker]

Tags work just like categories - except they are generally more highly specific to one topic or person, for that reason I beleive they are vaulable - they also provide an internal network structure you could not possibly build yourself on a large site.

I use an autotag funtion from simple tags to go back through every post and autotag every tag to every mention of that tag, that way it is always up to date and current. Simple tags is buggy though on large sites and I turn it off as soon as the autotag is finished - looking for a better option but haven't found one yet.

from experience on a large site (non poker), my tags always hit the number #1 spot so there is no prob. with google and tags and I am using the term /tag/ - although I agree it would be better to change to something else I just couldn't think of anything appropriate.

On a small site where a tag may only return one or two posts, I suspect tagging is useless. I think it really comes in to its own when you've got a site over about 200-300 posts

[TheDonk]

Wow, some great responses here everyone!

Thank you!