Yesterday I spent the day at the 2011 Wordcamp San Francisco. Great convention, well worth the $40 registration and lots of great information. If you use WordPress you should look for a Wordcamp near you and make a trip.
I attended the SEO for WordPress in 2011 presentation, given by Sujan Patel from Single Grain. Lots of good info again, SEO is always changing and you can always pick up little tidbits to help your site improve in its search ranking.
One point that Sujan made during a discussion of SEO Don’ts was…
Don’t use tags, stop using tags. See his slide deck, slide 15.
This came as news to me. He was pretty firm about saying stop using them. I always understood there to be SEO value to tags.
What do think is the SEO value of using tags?
I like tags. I think they’re extremely useful for finding content on a blog. Plus, they play to keywords which I would imagine does well with search engines.
I can’t really tell the negatives from the slidedeck, so I’m not sure what tags can hurt.
I think tags are great for IA… not everything content strategists do should be about SEO. If SEO overrules user experience, we’re soon going to be selecting Google settings that automatically display page 2 of search results….