Tags?
 

What's the benefit of using tags on your blogs? So far I see that use of categories and multiple blogs on the same domain are doing a great job. From what I can see tags are just like adding more categories to your blogs. Does that make sense?

Tags can get technorati traffic and they're much easier to add on the fly. Other then that, they're not much different from categories.

Tags allow you to increase the keyword density on your pages.

Sorry for the newbie post here but wanted to ask how do you know when to assign a tag or assign a category to a post? How do most of you seperate the two?

You'd typically tag a blog post with a keyword or keyword phrase that is found within the post or could be considered a subcategory that the post would fit in to. That's what tags really are: subcategories. If your blog post was about Boxers (the dog breed), and you already had a Boxer category which the post would be under, appropriate tags might be brindle boxer, fawn boxer, white boxer, war dog, etc. Most importantly, if a surfer was to stumble upon your fawn boxer tag page, any post listed there should mention fawn Boxers.

If you use any of the scripts that have been around forever, like WP, technorati will pick up your categories and treat them like tags

How do You get the tags to appear underneath your post?

got to use one of tag plug-ins like Ultimate Tag Warrior. though i do believe latest versions of WP have tag line already added to post writing so it's just a point of enabling it in Your theme

This is one plugin tool I can recommend for tagging.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-tags/

For what it's worth
The Tag Cloud on my aggregator broke and I left it that way for a few months
Search Engine traffic dropped in half.
Sparky fixed it for me and now I'm at three quarters the Search Engine Traffic I had

Simple tags is a great plug-in and if your using it put this at the bottom of the WP loop in your index fileIf your using WP tagging its thisUltimate tag warrior was a fantastic plug in, unfortunately it's never been updated to work beyond 2.1x

That sounds logic :-)

Woohoo! thank you so much! |bow|
This worked really well with a couple of my old themes. They are 3 columns and some of my tags were breaking into my posts because I use them a lot and they got too big.
I had looked on the wordpress forum and got this:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/164312
and it was suggested to bring up this link
wp-includes/widgets.php
to edit but when I linked to
http://www.myblog.com/wp-includes/widgets.php
I got a fatal error.
Maybe that is not the correct link, I'm not sure.
But anyway this plugin made it much easier because I could set the largest and smallest font sizes for my tags and also put them in a straight row so that they don't break into my posts.

Simple Tag is the best tag manager plug in, so following Simon's advice was very good.

If you are going to depend on tags, however, I would dowload the All in One SEO plug-in. The way google is starting to penalize duplicate content, most good SEO folks recommend choosing either categories or tags to allow the spider to follow (you can still have both on your page). All in one will allow you to choose what sections of your blog you allow the spiders to follow.

Normally, I choose to let it follow tags as you get more opportunity to rank higher - you will generally end up with more tags than categories. But, I have a couple of blogs that the categories are deep and competitively dominant, in which case I use the categories as the open follow link.

You can grab the plug in here
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/...-one-seo-pack/

Once you install it, it is fairly self-explanatory.

I use it, and that is excellent advice - thank you |bananna|
I like it especially for filling in things like meta tags etc, that I understand where to put them on a static html page, but have no clue where it goes in wordpress.
The plug-in knows, so that's good enough for me.