WordPress surely provides us with endless features and capabilities that can be utilized to lend our website with amazing features and unrestricted scalability. The WordPress tags happen to be among such highly sought after elements that further adds to the value and feature-set of a WP site. The biggest incentive to using the tags is the enhanced level of user engagement they are responsible for.
Taking a Closer Look at Tags
While, most of you may be aware of what tags are, in terms of its definition, but when it comes to truly utilizing them to make the most out of their features, the webmasters can be found scratching their heads.
To put it simply, tags can be thought of as the keywords of a particular post. These keywords may or may not be added for SEO purposes, but they do a great job of giving a clear idea of what a post may be about. As for their role in increasing the users’ engagement with your website, tags can be used for implementing the ‘related posts’ feature on your website.
How are Tags Useful WordPress?
This feature makes sure that when your users are reading a piece of content on your website, a thumbnail of another post that relates to the current one in some way appears right on this page so that the chances of the user sticking around to read another article are boosted. Also, as touched upon earlier, it has SEO benefits as well as the search engines get a clear-eyed idea of what content may be about when you are using the elaborate tags. Is rest assured, they don’t crowd your web pages with unnecessary elements, as they are simply some words that appear right at the end of each post.
- To further elaborate on the related-posts feature, two posts are lumped together as related posts in WordPress when they contain some common tags. For example, a post called “Best Hollywood Movies of 2014” may appear as related post to the post “Oscar-worthy movies of 2014” since they are bound to have a number of common tags like “movies” or the name of certain movies that are common in both the lists. This way, you are going the extra mile (without making an effort) to make sure that the bounce rate on your website is considerably reduced since there is a great probability of users checking out more than one post.
- The blog tags can also help you categorize your website’s content. Let’s say, you are running a website that publishes articles on WordPress, PHP and Android, whenever you are posting an article on WordPress, it can be tagged along with all the other previously published articles on WordPress. And the same goes or PHP and Android as well. So, when a particular user of your website clicks on the “WordPress” tag, all the related post thumbnails are displayed on one page, thus ensuring that your users don’t have to start looking for the information they intend to read.
- Tags also boost the working of tag clouds. Essentially, tag clouds serve the purpose of showcasing the tags that are scattered all over your website within a small area on the sidebar. The tags are most common on your website are displayed in larger font. Looking at the tag cloud gives your visitors a fair idea of what all your website contains in terms of the content.
- The post Meta tags can help in easy navigational structure of your website.
Now that you know how much value can these tags add to your website, it’s about time to present you a small code on how you can use them to display the related posts:
<?php
$posttags = get_the_tags();
$tags = '';
if ($posttags) {
foreach($posttags as $tag) {
$tags .= ','.$tag->name;
}
$taglist = substr($tags, 1);
query_posts('&tag='.$taglist.'&orderby=date&order=DESC&posts_per_page=3');
echo '<div class="entry-content">';
echo '<h2>Related Post</h2>';
echo '<ul>';
while( have_posts() ) : the_post();
echo '<li>';
the_title();
echo '</li>';
endwhile; wp_reset_query();
echo '</div>';
}
?>
The function get_the_tags() is made use of in order to arranging the tags of the post in an array.
foreach($posttags as $tag) {
$tags .= ','.$tag->name;
}
In the code, we have used ‘foreach’ as a php loop for it to be able to interact with the array. This way, we will be able to fetch all the tags individually.
As soon as we complete the code and run it, our posts will have the section for Related Posts appearing like in the picture above.
Wrapping Up
The WordPress tags serve some extremely critical purposes, as can be concluded from the points above. Evidently, they are not at all hard to implement and utilize. Hope the tutorial encourages you to start using the tags in your website more expeditiously.
