I’m sure a lot of people overlook this aspect but using Wordpress tags as keywords can take you to a place you’ve never been. Maybe not that drastic but it can definitely increase your search engine traffic as well as increase your earnings if you do it right.

What Are Wordpress Tags?

I have to explain this because I’m going to assume not everyone who uses Wordpress uses the post tags feature. I mean, when I first started using Wordpress, it took me a while to figure everything out. Plus, I didn’t think it would really help me as much as it did.

But if you’re writing up a post, you have a “post tags” feature on the right hand side (check out the screenshot below).

Basically, I try to put as many keywords, especially longtail keywords, within the post tags. And that’s what you should do too. Tags are essentially keywords for each page/post you create.

How Can Post Tags Increase Traffic?

The funny thing is search engines love tag pages. If you’re using Wordpress, each “tag” (which should also be one of your keywords) is its own individual page. So, let’s say you have 100 tags within your Wordpress blog, that means you have 100 pages potentially getting picked up by search engines.

And get this, a lot of my tag pages tend to get ranked higher than the actual post.

Let’s give an example, shall we?

You guys already know I have multiple blogs including iBlogtoBlog.com. Well, check out one of the posts in which I wrote about an online game and some cheats.

First, let’s check out how popular this keyword is by doing our keyword research. As you can see in the graph below of Google Trends, the straight line going up means a lot of people are searching for this term.

Now, if you simply search the term in Google, you’ll see my tag page and not the actual post as the first result (see screenshot below).

So, right off the bat, you’ll see how my site is getting lots of traffic based on my tag pages getting picked up by search engines and ranking higher than my actual posts.

How Do I Set This Up so Search Engines Pick Up my Tag Pages?

Well, first, you should start putting all of your keywords, including longtail keywords, as tags in each post. Of course, you should probably only put the main keywords relating to the post and not just the keywords for your blog in general.

Then you want to have two main plugin’s installed, the “All in One SEO Pack” and “Google XML Sitemaps”. One is for your SEO for your blog and the other is a sitemaps which lists all your posts, pages, etc… but most importantly, your tags. Search engine crawlers go through your sitemap as well as your blog, so this will help them pick things up.

Also, remember to configure your settings after you install the plugins.

How Do You Make Money with Wordpress Tags?

Honestly, I wasn’t thinking straight before but now I implemented it. So, how do you make money with Wordpress tags? It’s easy, you just throw any PPC (pay-per-click) ad like Google Adsense right at the top of the tag pages.

Since we’re working with primarily search engine traffic, these are going to be the same folks who click on your ads. But on individual tag pages, your ads usually don’t show up unless you have it embedded in your header or your sidebar. But even those may not fully get clicked on.

What I did was inserted a 336×250 Adsense block right at the top post of the tag page. So, when the search engine traffic lands there, that should be the first thing they see. (check out the screenshot below).

Normally, those ads won’t show up unless you put it there.

How Do You Put Adsense on Tag Pages?

You need to know how to adjust your CSS/HTML in your blog theme. If you’re not comfortable, feel free to ask.

In Wordpress, you want to go to the “appearance” section into your theme and click on “editor”. Somewhere in there should be a file titled “archives” or “archives.php”. Once you open up the editor, look for something that says “tag archive” or something similar. You basically want to put your Adsense code in there. Check out the screenshot below:

All themes are different so you might not even find a “tag archive”. And if you don’t, you should be able to put it under the next “archive” section because that’s where your tag page will be taken from.

I hope that makes sense.

Conclusion

When I was analyzing a lot of my stats, I kept noticing my tag pages getting indexed in search engines a lot faster and ranking higher and I felt I was losing out on potential revenue from this. Since I implemented this, I have increased my revenue from search engines drastically. I’m not sure what the exact numbers are but its kept me happier.

Also, there might be an easier way or even some other plugins that you could use to substitute but these are the ones I use that how I do it.

Hope that helps and you guys should try it or test it out if you haven’t already done so.

If you have any questions, let me know!