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Benefit: Tags can provide excellent search engine results for highly specific terms.
Problem: There’s really two problems here, both solved with judicious tagging. The first is providing an SEO-friendly structure to a series of blog posts, the second is providing a reader- (or author-) friendly link to a series of posts.
Practical WordPress Tip: Make sure each post in a series gets a unique tag so that you can find them when you need to edit them.
Here’s how: Simple, just create a unique tag for the series, and make sure to use it for each post in the series, and only for posts in that series.
Why: Good SEO description is partly a matter of triangulation. You want to describe your article – as accurately as you can – in as many ways as you can. Search engine algorithms evolve over time. The battle between search engines and spammers is an arms race, where search engines weight different aspects of your content and metadata. When you provide consistent metadata over time – tags in this case – you free yourself from worrying about “What’s Google Up To?” You don’t have any control over how Google or Bing weights your data and metadata, but you do have control over what they weight.
Using tags to create an implicit taxonomy helps structure your material for both the search engines and for readers.
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The other really nice thing about this is that you can link to that tag for a list of all the articles in the series. Very useful for your readers that want to read more practical tips (or whatever).
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Yes. I’m really liking how this Tips series is working out, too.
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