Wordpress Blogs: Create Custom Tag Pages

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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Tags: blog, custom tag pages, custom tags, tags, web development, wordpress, wordpress blog, wordpress tips
Categories: Tutorials Advanced

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5 Responses to “Wordpress Blogs: Create Custom Tag Pages”

1. Everton says:

   April 8, 2009 at 9:24 am

   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!

   Reply
2. Emre says:

   April 20, 2009 at 9:54 pm

   Good. Thanks :)http://www.emrearici.com

   Reply
3. Trisha says:

   July 23, 2009 at 7:21 pm

   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.

   Reply
4. Emre A. says:

   October 27, 2009 at 3:43 am

   Good! Good luck with results.

   Reply

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1. Bookmarks for May 3rd through May 4th » Diversions says:

   May 17, 2009 at 8:36 pm

   [...] Wordpress Blogs: Create Custom Tag Pages – Somehow I missed this while looking through the codex, but apparently Wordpress does allow for you to create custom tag landing pages. Nice feature and something I wish I knew before. [...]

   Reply