Creating and Editing Tags

In this post, you can find out all about publishing your posts in
WordPress and how you can assign different tags to your content. This sec-
tion takes you through the steps of managing tags, which is similar to the
way you manage categories. To create a new tag, follow these steps:

1. Click Post Tags in the Posts drop-down list.
The Post Tags page opens.
Unlike categories and links, WordPress doesn’t create a default tag for you, so when you visit the Post Tags page for the first time, no tags are listed on the right side of the page.
2. The left side of the Post Tags page displays the Add New Tag section.
3. Type the name of your new tag in the Name text box.
Suppose that you want to create a tag in which you file all your posts
about the books you read. In the Name text box, type something like
Fictional Books.
4. Type a name in the Slug text box.

The slug is the permalink of the tag and can help identify tag archives on
your site by giving them their own URL, such as http://yourdomain.
com/tag/fictional-books. By default, the tag slug adopts the words
from the tag name.
5. (Optional) Type a description of the tag in the Description text box.
Some WordPress templates are set up to actually display the tag
description directly beneath the tag name. Providing a description fur-
ther defines the category intent for your readers. The description can be as short or as long as you want.
6. Click the Add New Tag button.
That’s it! You’ve added a new tag to your blog. The Add New Tag page refreshes in your browser window with blank fields, ready for you to add another tag to your site.
7. Repeat Steps 2 through 7 to add an unlimited number of tags to
your blog.

You use the Tags and the Categories pages in your Dashboard to manage,

edit, and create new tags and categories to which you assign your posts
when you publish them. Book IV, Chapter 1 contains a lot of information
about how to go about assigning tags and categories to your posts, as well
as a few good tips on how you can create new categories and tags right on
the Edit Posts page itself.
Many WordPress Web sites have a cool feature called a tag cloud, which is a unique way to display a list of tags used on your site to give your readers navigation options to view your content. Figure 7-7 shows the tag cloud displayed on the sidebar of Lisa’s design blog.

At the top of the right sidebar in Figure 7-7, the tag cloud gives you an at-a-

glance peek at the topics Lisa writes about. You can tell the topic she writes about most often because that tag appears in the largest text; likewise, the topics displayed in small text aren’t written about quite as often. You can tell by her tag cloud that Lisa’s quite a fan of WordPress.