Tags; What are their purpose?

I have a VBulletin forum, and Im just wondering what the purpose of 'tags' are when your posting a new thread?
Im guessing they may be matatags, but are they for google and search engines, or for searching on the forum, or both?

 

On our forums we purely use these for seo as they show both at the bottom of the thread as well as alt text on forumdisplay. I think they have pretty much little use for members whatsoever. To be honest I think these should really only be shown to administrators, moderators and guests. Regular members I cant see them ever needing them.

They are not metatags, metatags appear in your vbulletin headinclude. These I think somewhat pump up the density of the particular page for whatever keywords.

 

So they are pretty much useless?

 

I personally don't even think they help with SEO as much as people would like to think. The only real use i've ever seen for tags is to tag your threads you like with something like your username, so you can find them easier.

 

Yeah, that's pretty much about the size of it. They (may) help a little bit with SEO, but I doubt that horribly. The do help with finding things, such as popular topics, but not a lot more than that.

 

I adjusted my header, so they pop up as meta tags. Gave me quite a boost on google

 

I have a music forum and users like to search for different types of music as well as artists, date, and show type. We use tags for types of music (rock, jazz, etc.) and artists (some you can't search for like "Yes" or "U2" or "The Who") and icons for show type (audience, FM, IEM/ALD, etc.) and search for dates (always yyyy-mm-dd). So, we use it as another method to find shows in those particular forums.

 

Is there a way you can set tags to do it automatically? I use tags to help with searches but my members don't. So I wouldn't mind some type of automated system.

 

I use them for sorting the chat transcripts; I'll tag them with "chat transcript", the year, and month and year together, so people can find them that way.

 

there are a couple mods at vB.org to help with this. Though none are better than some good ole fashioned human input but they might be better than nothing.

 

The auto thread tagger by NLP-ER is pretty good but make sure to read the first post thoroughly.

 

I use the tagging feature, as well, to find threads and posts easier. Honestly, I think it's a commonly used feature for members to locate threads and posts.