Organize Proper Post Labels

Post labels not only used to categorize our blog posts. If used smartly then we can take their benefits to optimize our blog posts too.
Stop using non keyword rich names for your labels. Named them correctly and put your really targeted words there.


If you had forgetten to insert your keywords in label’s name, then don’t worry. We can rename them too.

What are Labels?

Labels in blogs are keywords that categorize your entire blog content. They are simple links to your posts. Labels should be mostly based on general and specific keywords and should contain no more than three words. For example If I am a Chef and I write a blog, I will make sure I label all posts written on Asian dishes as "Asian Dishes" and those on Afghani dishes as "Afghan Food" and so on. This will help my readers to read all posts written on Asian Dishes by simply clicking the Asian Dishes label link.

The labels that appear below my post titles tells my readers what category does the post belong too. These labels also help widgets such as "Related Posts Widget" to fetch related posts and present it to the reader and thus increase engagement and page views. They are also one deciding factor of your blog's bounce rate. When you provide your readers with more comfortable options to navigate your blog, you are actually dropping your bounce rate which means you are forcing visitors to spend more time on your blog and that is indeed a great thing to do! So if you add labels wisely your entire blog will look organized.

Do Search Engines Value Labels or Categories?

Search engines especially Google hates them! That's why great emphasis was made in our last SEO posts to tag all labels as noindex, nofollow. Since Labels takes robots to a dynamic page therefore the page gets restricted by robots. By dynamic pages I mean, pages where the content keeps on updating. For example whenever you label a new post, you are adding a new post to your label page. This is just like updating a single post every single day which robots hate! Because an update pings spiders to come and crawl your data again. Pinging search engines to crawl the same page again and again is taken seriously because it wastes precious time.

How to choose correct labels?

Decide at most 10-20 labels for your entire blog and always link new posts to them. Take an example of labels used by MBT blog. Since I frequently write on widgets, templates, blogging tips and SEO tips therefore I have chosen these keywords for letting my users know what categories do the blog offers for healthy reading. You can take an idea by looking at all keywords I used in my label cloud.

Keep these points in mind:

1.     Use at most 20 labels for your entire blog

2.     Use at most three words for defining a label

3.     Give preference to short one word labels

4.     Use your main SEO keywords in your labels. (Not to help search engines but to help your visitors better understand the concept behind your blog)

5.     Link each post with relevant label. If a post doesn't relates to any category then create a general Label link and name it "Miscellaneous"

6.     Use no more than two or three labels for each post

Blogspot proper labels and related posts:

Label adds to the keyword density of the post . Labels should be widened rather than putting them into single narrow category .I will explain this point by an example . Consider a situation when you are posting about Google chrome and putting them into label Windows software’s or browser . Here you will miss keywords like Chrome browser ,Google chrome etc. which would otherwise add to the keyword density of the whole post . Labels also affects related posts widgets in Blogger.And if there are so many posts tagged with similar labels ,it would affect the arrangement of articles in related posts .

Organize Labels:

 You must not use more than 15-20 labels in order to keep blog navigation clean and easy both for readers and search engines.

Remove or Delete Labels In Blogger:

Add tags or labels to your posts is an important SEO step for letting spiders to better understand the content and categories of your blog. Due to unfriendly user interface of the Edit Posts section of blogger dashboard, most people find it difficult to remove, apply and add new labels to the posts. I was going to write a post on it but I have found an easy video tutorial created by Blogger team themselves. I am sure you will enjoy understanding todays tutorial via this video.

Remove and Delete Labels From Blogger blogs:

How to Use Labels, Tags or Categories for Easy Navigation

Categories are named Labels in Blogger whereas they are named Tags or Categories in Wordpress. It keeps your blog posts well organized and helps visitors find easily what he is looking for. To maintain a logical category structure is extremely important in bloging. Many Use a ton of labels or tags in blog. They use more labels for a single topic. Sometimes, they use more than 2/3 labels for a single post. They think more tags and labels will help them but actually unnecessary labels or tags confuse visitors to find his desired content. I think this is unwise.

Use Only a Single Label for a Single Topic:

For example, if you use 3 labels such as SEO, SEO Tutorials, SEO Tips, a visitor will surely be confused to find his desired content. If you use only a single label for SEO topic, visitors can easily find his desired content in SEO label. So keep a single labels or tags for a single topic. It will not only organize blog posts well but also help visitors to navigate and find content easily. You should keep number of labels as less as you can. Avoid unnecessary labels or tags which is really irritating.

At this, visitors find it easy to navigate you site and this will make him interested to visit again. We must bear in mind that we blog for visitor’s satisfaction.

2) Categories – Group your pages into categories to help users and search engines find what they want faster. It’s like having a warehouse with lots of uncategorised items versus a warehouse with all the items assigned to a dedicated category. You can have sub-categories as well but my advice is not to go over one level. For example a good category structure is:

Reliablesoft > Social Media > Facebook and not Reliablesoft > Social Media > Facebook > Tips

How to Noindex WordPress Categories and Tags?

There are actually two ways to noindex WordPress categories, tags and archive pages.

1.     Robots.txt: You can easily tell search engines not to index WordPress categories and tags just by adding the following noindex tag to your Robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /tag/

2.     Meta Robots WordPress Plugin: Install Meta Robots pluginand simply checkmark the following options

o        Author archives

o        Date-based archives

o        Category archives

o        Tag archives

Although you’ve de-indexed your categories and tags from search indexing, it will take some time for those pages to go off from the public view. However, you can manually remove these indexed category and tag pages using the Google webmaster tools.

How to Remove WordPress Category and Tag Archives via Webmaster Tools?

1.     Login to your Google webmaster tools account.

2.     Select your WordPress blog from the list.

3.     Go to “Optimization” > Remove URLs

4.     Click on “Create a new removal request” button and enter the URL.

5.     Click “Continue” for each of the above two URL removal requests.

6.     On the next screen, click on the drop-down menu and choose the reason as “Remove Directory” and click “Submit”.

That’s it! Google will now remove and/or deindex all your WordPress category and tag archives. As it will take some time to remove all these indexed pages, please be patient.