Tags and keywords both help people to find information on your blog. But there are key differences between the two that are important to know.

You may assume, as I once did, that the tags you attach to each blog post are helping your SEO. But the tags you assign to each post are simply labels that help your readers find information within your blog. For example, if you’re a dietitian, you may want to assign the label “vegan protein” to all the posts you write about hemp hearts, quinoa, brown rice, et cetera. That way, all those articles will come up when readers search for vegan protein recommendations on your blog. 

Tags and Keywords: What Search Engines are Looking For

If you want search engines to find each of those posts, you must assign more specific keywords to each post. And here’s the key difference: you can create whatever tags you want within your own blog, but keywords must match the search terms people are using on the search engines. Otherwise, they’re virtually useless. This is why keyword research is so important.

How you write each blog post is also important. Your post can still be effective, from an SEO standpoint, at only 300 words long. BUT here are four other things you must do to ensure the search engine crawlers can easily find and index it:

1. Include your primary keyword in the slug (the URL) you create for the blog post.
2. Include that keyword in at least one of your headings.
3. Ensure the keyword also appears in the first paragraph.
4. Attach the keyword to an image within the blog post, too.

Doing these things will make it clear to the crawlers what each individual blog post is about. It will ensure they know which keywords you want indexed.

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