Adding Post Tags To Your Wordpress Blog Theme

Adding Post Tags To Your WordPress Blog Theme

By Mehak Naheem Monday, June 6th 2011

Hey guys, I do have to say that I am not at all a technical person. Put it this way- I have an iphone and I only use it for email, calling, internet and texting! So when I realised that my blog posts weren’t showing tags, I was a bit concerned that maybe I had changed the settings somehow when setting up and deleted a vital part of my blog! After all, having tags can make a huge difference to the way your blogs rank and makes it easier for people to see your posts. Eg: if you write about making money online then you should use that keyword as a tag so that your post is linked to those searches. The more people that visit your blog the better! So I was over the moon and very impressed with myself when I tried this trick and it worked

If you’re like me and a WordPress user, you may have find that your WordPress theme has not been set up to display post tags in a single blog post. This may not be the case in certain blog themes, depending on what theme you’re choosing to install and use.

Showing the post tag in your theme’s blog posts has many benefits:

Using post tags in your blog will allow your users to find your content by entering keywords into the search feature of your blog or search engines. The reason we have information on blogs is for people to see them, (unless you have private posts). Therefore even if you don’t’ wish to make money online or gather leads from your blog, maybe you just want to pass out information to people. You still want your content showing when people search for the information you provide.

Search Engine Optimization – Adding tags to your posts that are keywords used in each blog post will help increase the keyword density of each article. This will show search engines that your post is relevant to certain keywords people may be searching and it’ll rank up higher in search results if the content seems relevant to what people are looking for.

Before changing anything in your sites coding, I highly recommended that you save a backup copy of any file before editing.

Step 1 – Log into your WordPress Dashboard, by going to the site admin and enter in your log in info.
Step 2 –Click on ‘Appearance’ then ‘Editor’.
Step 3 – On the right hand column there will be different words, scroll down then click on “Single Post” (single.php).
Step 4 – Once the single.php code has loaded in the editor, click anywhere in the box carry out a ‘find’ search by pressing the CTRL+F keys together to perform a search (Apple+F for Apple Users).
Step 5 – In the search box which appears, type “php the_content” (without the quotes) and click find/enter. If your theme is using the content tag, then it should find and highlight it in the editor automatically.
Step 6 – Create a new line after the code finishes at the ‘php the-content’ line by placing your mouse cursor and pressing enter after the following code as shown below:

<?php the_content(); ?>

Step 7 – Copy and paste the following code to the new line which you have now created:

<?php the_tags('Tags: <b>', ', ', '</b><br />'); ?>

Step 8 – Click the “Update File” button which should be at the bottom of the codes box to save your changes.
Step 9 – You can now refresh your blog post to see your changes.
Step 10 – You’re finished!