How do you determine which tags to create?

Proper use of tags is a powerful way to categorize your content. Each time you create a tag, a tag page is automatically created for that tag as well. A tag page is a page where you can add some descriptive text about that tag, with links to all news articles with that tag added.

When you add a tag to a news article, this article is automatically added to the tag page of that tag. As a result, tag pages are crucial for SEO as they group all articles around the same topic which creates a good organization of your content. Tag pages themselves can also attract a lot of search traffic, especially if the correct descriptive text is added.

Best practices for setting up a good tag system are:

1) Limit the number of tags you create. Only use tags for topics you often write news articles about. It makes no sense to create tags that you only use a few times because then a tag page is created with only a few news items linked to. Such tag pages with only a few linked news items hurt the SEO of your website. The rule of thumb is that you should only create tags if you use them more than 5 times.

2) The primary purpose of creating tags is to improve SEO and increase search traffic to your website. Create only tags that are words that are frequently searched for in Google. The more search traffic there is on a particular keyword, the more sense it makes to make a tag out of it and furnish the tag page with extra text on the tag page.

TIP: Check the search results in your Google Search Console regularly (for example, at a fixed time per week) to see if there are new relevant keywords with a lot of search volume that you have not yet created a tag and SEO-friendly tag page for.

3) Be careful not to create duplicate tags, so do not create nearly identical tags. Such as Maxverstappen, Max Verstappen, MaxVerstappen2020. This confuses Google and can negatively affect your SEO.

TIP: Always check if the tag already exists before creating a new tag.