How to Add tags to a WordPress Post

WordPress Tutorial #13

WordPress gives you three ways to organize your site:

1. Menus
2. Categories
3. Tags

In Tutorial #10 you learned how to set up Custom Menus. Tutorial #11 showed you how to use Categories.

Now we’re going to focus on the third item, Tags.

What’s a WordPress Tag?

A tag is a descriptive word or phrase that you assign to a post in WordPress. Tags help your readers when they’re searching your site. You can assign as many tags as you want to any post.

Unlike WordPress categories, tags have no hierarchy, or parent-child relationship.

How to Add a Tag to a Post

Adding a tag to a post is super easy. In fact, it’s a little too easy so if you’re not careful you could end up with a lot more tags than you need. We’ll get to that in a another article.

Go to your WordPress dashboard, then click Posts/Add New.

Create and save your post.

Add the Tags

On the right-hand side of your screen you’ll see an item labeled Tags. It’s usually the third item down, under Publish and Categories, although that can vary with the theme.

Decide on the tags you want to apply. Then type them into the box, separated by commas.

A tag can be one or more words, so remember to use those commas!

When you’re finished, click the Add button or just press your Enter key and you’ll see them below the text box.

I’m going to add some tags to this post now.

I’ll type in WordPress, tags and navigation.

Once you add the tags, they show up underneath the text box. If you want to delete one, just click the small icon in front of it.

You can also use tags you’ve added previously. Just click the link that says Choose from the most used tags. When you do, WordPress shows you a tag cloud. Tags you use most are the largest, so it’s easy to pick your most popular tags.

To add a tag from the cloud, just click on it.

Many themes let you choose whether to show the tags on the published post. If you display the tags, readers can click on them and see a blog page listing all the posts that share that tag.

Even if your theme doesn’t show the tags, they’ll help when your readers search your site.