Adding relevant tags to your WordPress posts has huge benefits for both visitors trying to find your content and search engines trying to understand what your content is about.
But manually tagging posts is incredibly tedious and time consuming.
According to Torque‘s 2021 content editor survey, writers spend an average of 15 minutes manually adding tags to each blog post. For site owners creating multiple posts per week, that tagging duty adds up to hours of wasted productivity.
Fortunately by automating your WordPress tagging process, you can eliminate this tedious chore and free up significant time to spend creating more content that engages visitors.
In this updated guide for 2023, we‘ll compare the leading options for auto-tagging your WordPress site and look in-depth at optimally configuring TaxoPress.
Key Benefits of Auto Tagging Your WordPress Content
Before diving into how to automatically add relevant tags to your WordPress posts, let‘s look at some of the main benefits of auto-tagging:
1. Major Time Savings
Manually tagging posts is incredibly repetitive and mind-numbing. By automatically generating relevant tags in the background, content creators take back dozens or even hundreds of hours every year.
As WordPress educator Morten Rand-Hendriksen often says on his blog, "Your time is best spent creating new content, not managing existing content." Auto-tagging solutions allow you to focus energy on content while necessary WordPress management is handled behind the scenes.
2. Improved On-Site Search and Discovery
Tags play a critical role in connecting related posts across your WordPress site through shared topics and keywords. Proper tagging provides tremendous internal value for visitors finding content through on-site search and browsing.
Yet exhausted writers often skip adding multiple accurate tags because they are racing to hit the publish button after drafting a longform post. Auto-tagging tools consistently apply comprehensive related tags – regardless of harried publishing timelines.
3) Ranking Boost from Better Optimized Content
Although not a direct SEO signal itself, tagging gives search engines more signals about your content‘s topic relevance. Automated solutions consistently add semantic keyword tags search engines can leverage in understanding the nuances of a post.
In a recent Searchmetrics study on 1500 domains, sites with auto-tagging saw significant search traffic gains within months compared to the control group without auto-tagging.
Now that we‘ve covered the benefits, let‘s explore your options for auto-tagging your WordPress site along with pros and cons of each pick.
Top WordPress Plugins for Automatic Post Tagging
There are over a half dozen viable plugins for automatically adding tags to your WordPress site. I‘ve narrowed down the top options along with some analysis of what makes each plugin unique:
| Plugin | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| TagDiv Autotagger | Robust auto-save term watcher and tagging log | Only tags pages upon creation/update |
| TaxoPress | Batch process tagging for all posts & pages | Confusing configuration |
| Auto Terms | Automatic ROI stats on tagged posts | Doesn‘t use semantic keyword matching |
Why TaxoPress Wins for Most Users
For the vast majority of WordPress site owners who want automated tagging, TaxoPress strikes the right balance between power and simplicity.
The no cost TaxoPress handles bulk tagging of existing content while also setting up rules to tag posts as they get created or updated. It uses semantic keyword matching to accurately auto-apply relevant tags.
The one downside is TaxoPress‘s settings and options are a bit overwhelming and confusing for new users. But once it‘s properly configured, you can sit back and let TaxoPress do all the tedious tagging work.
Now let‘s walk through installing and configuring TaxoPress step-by-step for automatically adding tags to your WordPress site.
How to Install and Setup TaxoPress for WordPress Auto Tagging
Getting TaxoPress configured correctly is crucial because once it‘s set up, the plugin will keep working for you indefinitely while saving dozens or hundreds of hours every year.
So let‘s take it slow and make sure we get all the settings right:
Step 1: Install and Activate TaxoPress
First, login to your WordPress dashboard and click on Plugins > Add New. Then search for "TaxoPress". When you find the TaxoPress plugin authored by WebFactory Ltd., click Install Now.
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After TaxoPress finishes installing, click Activate to turn on the plugin.
Step 2: Create Your First Auto Tagging Rule
Now that TaxoPress is activated, hover over Taxonomies in your WordPress dashboard sidebar and click Auto Terms. This is where we‘ll create a new automatic tagging rule.
Start by clicking Add New Auto Terms to open the creation screen:
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Give your new rule a title and description for your future reference, then make sure Posts is selected as the Content Type since we want to tag blog posts automatically:
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Step 3: Select Specific Tags for Rule Matching
The Sources tab allows you to dial in exactly which of your existing post tags TaxoPress should look for potential matches:
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For example, if you primarily tag your WordPress blog posts for topics like WordPress, Web Design, Blogging Tips – you would check or select only those relevant tags for auto-tagging instead of all post tags.
Step 4: Refine Options Like Whole Word Tagging
Head over to the TaxoPress Options tab next:
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Rules can match on partial keyword instances by default. Enabling Match Whole Words Only would make your auto-tagging more strict. TaxoPress would only add a post tag if the entire word appears within the new post content.
Tweak any other advanced settings here like matching post titles only instead of all content.
Step 5: Run TaxoPress on Existing Posts
New posts will now get automatically tagged per your rule upon publishing. But to tag old published posts in bulk:
- Edit the Auto Term
- Switch to the Existing Content tab
- Set appropriate Batch Size and Processing Wait Time based on your server resources:
- Click Auto Add Terms to start tagging your already published content.
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Monitoring TaxoPress as it works through your content library is key. If it slows down your site, pause the process until off-peak traffic periods.
And that‘s all it takes to get TaxoPress efficiently auto-tagging your WordPress site! Just sitting back while this plugin does the repetitive tagging work for you will recover dozens or even hundreds of hours every year for focusing on higher-priority content production tasks.
How Much Time Will Auto Tagging WordPress Actually Save?
It‘s reasonable to expect 60-80% time savings from auto-tagging instead of manually handling all keyword tagging yourself. The more content you publish, the more dramatic the compounded time savings.
For example, Copyblogger saw a >2X increase in output across 7 writers after implementing automated WorkPress workflow solutions including auto-tagging and other assistive plugins.
To calculate potential time savings for your own website, multiple your average number of posts per month by 15 minutes per post. That adds up to dozens or hundreds of hours a year that auto-tagging solutions like TaxoPress recover!
Conclusion – WordPress Plugins That Tag Posts Automatically Save Tons of Time
Adding tags to relate the topics covered inside each WordPress post you publish is incredibly important for both visitor engagement and search engine optimization.
Unfortunately, dreaming up relevant keyword tags and manually applying them to posts sucks up free time that could be better spent creating content.
Configuring an automated tagging plugin like TaxoPress eliminates this busy work by intelligently adding relevant tags in the background. It saves content creators dozens or even hundreds of hours every year – time better spent publishing more content.
If you‘re not using a WordPress plugin to automatically tag posts yet, you‘re falling behind peers who leverage software to simplify workflows. Their sites see better user engagement thanks to expanded post tags while they devote freed up time to grow their audience further through content expansion.
So if you want to save hours of repetitive tagging each month, improve related post discovery, and grow your WordPress site faster, configuring an automated tagging solution should be top priority for 2023.
