How to use WordPress Tags
Simple: Delete them.
Current best practices for food blogs are to use your categories properly, and completely delete all tags.
Categories and tags serve almost the same purpose, and require extensive setup to use effectively, including unique titles, descriptions and careful thought about what your audience values.
The majority of sites out there barely have enough content to use just categories effectively, so tags have no place.
- How to use categories
- Food blog site structure
- Configure the category pages
- Create high quality landing-page style Modern Categories
Having empty categories or tags with no unique description, that are not organized based on keywords your audience uses, are useless.
Worse than that, they actually hurt your site because it creates hundreds of thin-content pages.
There's an easy way to test this: Go into your Google Analytics and Google Search Console and look at whether these tag pages are even being used.
Here's a good interview with Casey Markee on managing your site's content.
Is it safe then to simply delete all these tags that have been used completely wrong? Or will there be a ton of broken URLs? Asking for a friend ...
To be extra safe, you'll want to hire an SEO expert like https://mediawyse.com/ to do an audit for you. As noted above, check to see if there's any traffic or backlinks going to them.
But in 99% of situations, yes, simply deleting all tags is a good move.