A WordPress blog post consists of a handful of elements like the title and body but also tags, categories and comments. Tag pages usually display excerpts of all posts that use the same tag. One example: If you search for Windows 7 Download on Google you find that a tag page for my website Windows 7 News is ranking on the third page of the results. Tag pages on the other hand are usually not the pages that visitors expect when visiting a website.
Webmasters can however utilize tag pages better in their WordPress blogs by creating so called custom tag pages which can contain any information they want. If you open the page above you notice that it does not contain a listing of blog excerpts but a custom page for that tag.
WordPress provides the means to create those custom tag pages easily. Custom tag pages can be created in the theme directory of the WordPress directory by adding a new template file to the theme. This new template file needs to begin with tag followed by the post slug of the tag. In the case of the Windows 7 Download tag it would have to be named tag-windows-7-download.php.
Custom tag pages have a higher priority than the default ones that show only excerpts of the posts. The easiest way to fill the custom tag with content is the following:
WordPress looks for the following files in order to create those tag pages:
- tag-slug.php
- tag.php
- archive.php
- index.php
Look into your theme folder and see if there is a tag.php file. If it is copy its contents and create a new php file that is using the tag-slug.php as its name. If ther eis no tag.php look for archive.php and finally index.php.
Now simply add content to the file. It might take some experimentation at the beginning but it can be really worth it in the long run. If you have any questions or additions let me know in the comments.
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Google also monitors bounce rates, so if your tag pages don’t look relevant they will eventually lose their positions, so this is worth doing for any pages on a site that’s getting a lot of traffic.
I’m glad we added some custom tag pages on Windows 7 and I’m going to check the stats on all my sites to see if I should create more.
BTW I saw this post on twitter so it really does help promote posts!
Good. Thanks :)http://www.emrearici.com
any pointers on how to seo a tag page to its fullest potential? I had my first natural search visitor to a blog i havent promoted yet. They found me through a tag page. i didnt even know it existed, dont have much backlinking experience;)
seems it could be pretty powerful if done correctly, and probably would only take a couple tweaks.
Good! Good luck with results.
i want plugin
What I am looking to do is similar. I am looking to have a static page as well as the blog appear on the main page of my wordpress site. Right now going to the settings section will only allow me to do one or the other. any feedback would be appreciated. Is there a special PHP INCLUDE tag I should be using for both to appear?
Roch you can edit the index.php file manually to add static content to it. That’s how I have done it on the ghacks front.
my name is amit on my website i want to show all the tags on separate page post how to do that?
Amit this may help you http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-display-all-tags-in-one-page