What Is an SEO Tag Page?
An SEO tag page is a mini glossary that lists all the articles a publisher has written about a certain topic. Publishers who are interested in optimizing their websites for search should use tag pages as a way to increase their Google ranking for certain high-value keywords. Most digital publishers today are already tagging content with relevant keywords. Tags are designed to describe content so readers can find related articles, and they are especially useful for browsing and searching. Readers can click on tags to quickly jump to relevant content. Although there was a time when collections of tags were put together as tag clouds, that style has fallen out of favor. Instead, SEO experts in 2021 are now recommending that publishers group tags together onto pages, commonly known as tag pages. An SEO tag page is where people can find fast and straightforward answers to all kinds of questions. Think of this as a potential landing page for queries, based on the keywords in your keyword universe. Thankfully for publishers who are using WordPress, creating SEO tag pages is a simple process that can lead to big gain in traffic volume. SEO tag pages can be used as high-value landing pages for important keywords or search terms. If your tag pages are optimized, then they might rank on the first page of Google search results when someone searches for a related keyword or question. How to Create an SEO Tag Page  Before you can build SEO tag pages, you need to begin by creating a keyword universe. Working with a web developer like Web Publisher PRO and an SEO specialist to identify the keywords you want to target. Your web developer can load these keywords into your content management system (CMS) as tags. Whenever you publish content related to the terms, add these tags so the content can be grouped together. Depending on the approach youve chosen, you can add tags manually or automatically. Most publishers never consider where their SEO tags lead, but on the majority of modern websites, tags lead to their own landing pages. When you click on a tag at the bottom of an article, youre usually taken to a page that lists all the content with that same tag. The vast majority of SEO tag pages are unoptimized, and publishers havent considered how they could use those pages to boost their ranking on important keywords or search terms. If your SEO tag page is unoptimized, now is the time to change that. Work with your web developer to turn your generic tag pages into glossary pages. Glossary pages should be setup with the answers to common questions at the top, followed by links to relevant articles down below. By answering visitors questions and directing them to relevant resources, you can decrease bounce rates and keep visitors on your website for longer. How to Optimize an SEO Tag Page  If your tag pages are auto-generated, then theres a good chance they arent performing as well as they could. The first step in optimizing a tag page is to analyze your existing pages for content quality. Based on that analysis, you should be able to isolate pages that are too similar or contain too much of the same content. Having too many similar pages can hurt your Google rankings, so its best to identify, isolate, and remove tag pages that look nearly identical before moving on to more advanced optimization strategies. The descriptions for your tag pages that show up in search results are most likely being pulled directly from a single article on the tag page, and that might not be reflective of all the content you have available. To alleviate this issue and optimize your SEO tag page, manually fill in the metadata in your CMS. Dont rely on auto-populated metadata for tag landing pages, since theres a good chance that the metadata that is being pulled automatically is inaccurate. The next step in optimizing your tag pages is to add title tags and body copy. Relying on a single tag at the top of the page isnt enough if you want the best possible search performance. Include terms like What are and Who is in the titles of your tag pages, along with brief descriptions of the content that readers will find. Key Takeaways  An optimized SEO tag page can be a valuable resource for readers. Tag pages, or glossary pages, can also be hugely beneficial for publishers if they rank on the first page of Google search results. Take these steps to improve the performance of your tag pages right away:  Always tag content with all relevant keyword tags. Dont rely on auto-populated metadata. Isolate and remove tag pages that are too similar. Add brief descriptions to tag pages so readers know what they will find. Use a CMS like WordPress to expedite the process of developing optimized pages. To learn more about the latest SEO strategies for digital news publishers, click here.