Content Marketing Glossary

  • What are Tags?

What are Tags?

Tags

Tags are short labels applied to content, products, or users to support categorisation, filtering, search, and personalisation. In content management (WordPress, Shopify, HubSpot), tags group related articles or products. In analytics and marketing automation, tags track user behaviour and segment audiences. In HTML, <meta> tags carry page metadata. The word is overloaded - the same term covers distinct systems - and understanding which tag system is being discussed is usually the first step to using any of them well.

The three main tag systems marketers encounter

Content tags. Labels applied to blog posts, products, or media. Drive tag-archive pages (/tag/growth-marketing/), related-content recommendations, and content discovery within a site. Used by CMS platforms and sometimes also by search engines as weak topic signals.

HTML meta and structural tags. Elements in the page’s code - <title>, <meta name="description">, <h1> through <h6>, <link rel="canonical">. These drive SEO, search-result display, and accessibility. Different from content tags despite the shared name.

Behavioural and audience tags. In marketing automation platforms (HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Kit, Mailchimp), tags attached to contacts track behaviour (“opened onboarding email”, “visited pricing page”) or attributes (“customer”, “lead”, “enterprise-size”). Drive segmentation and automated workflows.

Content tags in practice

Content tags are the most commonly misused system. Five patterns that waste them:

Tag proliferation. A site with 2,000 blog posts and 1,800 unique tags has tags so granular they’re useless. Each tag should have a reasonable number of posts (10+) to be worth having.

Duplicates and near-duplicates. “SEO”, “search engine optimization”, “search engine optimisation”, “seo tips”. Pick one. Duplicate tags fragment the tag-archive signal.

Tags as categories. Using tags where categories should be used (or vice versa). The distinction: categories are hierarchical and exclusive (“Marketing > Email Marketing”); tags are flat and non-exclusive (“email”, “deliverability”, “list-building”).

Private-use tags leaked publicly. Internal tags (“to-review”, “sponsored”) exposed on the public site. Editorial tags should stay editorial; only public-useful tags should surface in URLs.

No tag strategy. Tags added ad-hoc by whoever happens to be publishing. Over time, the tag taxonomy becomes incoherent. A one-time audit plus tag-approval discipline fixes this.

HTML tags for SEO

Four specific HTML tags that matter for search performance:

Title tag. The page’s <title> element. Appears in the browser tab and as the clickable headline in search results. Often the single highest-impact on-page element; a rewrite alone can lift CTR meaningfully.

Meta description. The <meta name="description"> element. Shown in the SERP beneath the title. Doesn’t directly rank the page, but a well-written description lifts CTR and indirectly supports rankings through user behaviour signals.

Header tags. <h1> through <h6>. Structure the content hierarchy for readers and for crawlers. Critical for both accessibility and SEO.

Canonical tag. <link rel="canonical">. Signals to search engines which URL is the authoritative version when duplicates exist. Common on e-commerce filter pages and multi-URL product listings.

Behavioural tags in marketing automation

Three useful tag-naming conventions:

Namespace prefix. “source:webinar”, “behaviour:opened-onboarding”, “attr:enterprise”. The prefix tells anyone reviewing a contact what kind of tag it is.

Temporal tags separately. “visited-pricing-2024-q1” is more useful than “visited-pricing” in aggregate reporting. Time-bounded tags can be pruned after their usefulness expires.

One source of truth per fact. If a contact becomes a customer, remove the “lead” tag and add the “customer” tag. Tags that accumulate without ever being removed become noise.

Tag hygiene audit

Six things to check in any tag system quarterly:

  • Any unused tags can be removed
  • Near-duplicate tags should be consolidated
  • Private/editorial tags aren’t exposed publicly
  • Tag-archive pages render well and aren’t duplicating content-marketing effort
  • Behavioural tags older than 24 months should be evaluated for relevance
  • Any CMS-automation rules using tags are still actively firing

We built Penfriend to generate content with clean tagging and categorisation - descriptive tags that group related pieces, taxonomy choices that align with content models. Tag discipline at scale requires systemic thinking, not per-article decisions.

Related terms