A tag is, quite literally, a label: a word (or alphanumeric code) that acts as a kind of “container” in the digital world.
What is a tag?
It is a word, or a set of numbers and letters, that labels a certain type of content. Tags are used both in “pure” SEO, which focuses on a website’s text content, and in its HTML structure.
If you run a blog, tags help you organize your posts by topic. So are they the same as categories? No. A blog’s categories classify content vertically, while tags classify it horizontally.
Here’s an example. If you have a marketing blog, your categories might be “digital marketing” and “offline marketing”, while your tags could include “B2B” and “B2C”. That’s because your site’s content might cover B2C marketing both online and in the real world.
How to use tags on a blog
If your blog runs on WordPress, the platform itself will ask you to assign categories and tags to each post. On Blogger, by contrast, they’re simply called “labels”.
The key for a blogger is to tell tags apart from keywords. Tags act as signposts for readers, guiding them to content within your site, while keywords are what bring people to your site through a targeted search.
In practice, keywords are words (or combinations of words) that let users and search engines easily find your page among thousands of others. Tags and categories, on the other hand, help visitors move between related pages once they’re on your site.
Meta tags: your page’s HTML structure
When you build a website and publish new content, two main elements come into play: the look of the page (the text and images users see when they open it) and the HTML structure, the code that stays invisible to the reader.
That doesn’t make it any less important. Quite the opposite. Knowing how to write HTML gives your site good readability, a consistent structure and a much better chance of being recognized by search engines.
This is where meta tags come in: snippets of HTML code that act as “labels” for the page elements crawlers need to recognize.
Some of the most important tags
- Meta title: the clickable blue headline you see in a Google result. In short, the title of your blog post. It goes in the page’s source code between the <TITLE></TITLE> tags.
- Meta description: also shown in search results, it briefly summarizes the page content. It should be accurate, concise and include the post’s main keyword.
- Alternative Text Tag: the attribute that describes an image on the page in a short sentence.