Few people say that tags appeared on the web when the web 2.0 era started, however if we look at the history we had tags available in the form of meta tags. Although, when webmasters started to abuse them by putting wrong meta tags for getting the traffic and to control that all search engines stopped providing search results on the basis of meta tags only.

However, later Technorati came in the picture and brought back the concept of tags and allowed bloggers to tag their posts according to the content type and thus making it accessible to the searcher the kind of posts they were interested in.

Although, Technorati is on downfall but we need to thank it as it brought back the concept of tags in a new and better way. Meta tags are hidden as they were meant for the search engines, however modern tags are for the visitors and now lets discuss that how exactly tags are useful for the visitors :

1. Usability and functionality : Tags are pretty handy when it comes to navigation. Let’s say you have a blog on windows softwares, so you can put a software like SnagIT in the category screencasting but you can associate various tags like Shareware, TechSmith, SnagIT, Windows etc. with it. So, if a person is interested in looking at all the shareware then he’ll be shown SnagIT also. Tags help a visitor in reaching the desired content in the fastest way and thus avoids wasted clicks.

2. Helps in SEO : Tags help in good internal linking of the pages and thus makes a positive impression to the search engines. Secondly the tags act as keywords and certain plugins like All-in-one-seo pack put the tags as meta-keywords, which helps in the SEO of the blog pages. Apart from that tag clouds also help in telling the search engines that which content should be favored more.

Note : Mani has written an excellent post, where he tells the difference between categories and tags and how they can help in SEO and how they can pose a threat in SEO.

How to add tags to the posts ?

While you are writing the blog article from the WordPress dashboard, you’ll see the text box below which will read as Tags. Put all the tags over there, separated with commas and you’ll have a tagged wordpress post.

If you are using any desktop blog client like Windows Live Writer or Ecto then they allow you to add tags and have the tag option on the left and right respectively.