If you use WordPress, you’re likely familiar with Yoast SEO. One of the platform’s most popular plugins, Yoast analyzes content and provides insights on how it can be improved for SEO and readability. However, while it’s a useful tool, using Yoast can be a frustrating experience. If you’re like me, your initial encounters resulted in hours spent tweaking your content to gain the plugin’s approval, often to futile effect. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself, “Is it worth it?” I asked myself that very question, and the answer I found was…well, it’s complicated.

The term “tag” may be one of the most common in the SEO lexicon, but its meaning is far from homogenous. While most tags are basically HTML code attributes that describe webpage content, it can be hard to distinguish between meta tags, title tags, header tags and others. And then there’s the practice of “tagging” your posts, which is something else altogether. To cut through the confusion, we’ve defined the most common types of tags and provided a brief explanation of each one’s function.

In many ways, digital marketing isn’t that different from other forms of marketing. For instance, they all share the same objective: to increase a business’ visibility to potential customers. The difference with digital marketing is that in addition to paid advertising, there are ways to boost visibility that don’t cost a dime. Most of these fall into the category of search engine optimization, more commonly called “SEO.”