Originally tags were a way to group links to blog postings (or in the case of Hubpages hubs) that are topically related. Many folks have come to the conclusion that adding a lot of tags can help your search engine traffic, so are suggesting adding a ton of tags.

But, tags aren't magic for traffic for your Hubpages. There's a reason they work well. Here's a few observations on some pros and cons on tags for Hubpages. Most of this works for blogs like Wordpress as well, as the process of creating tags works in a similar way there.

First, lets take a look at the keys for generating good rankings on Google. Here is the grossly oversimplified version of success in Google rankings. This isn't a course on ranking, but just enough information to understand why tags are important. What we don't cover here is the choice of keywords. It's obvious that if you choose to optimize for a keyword that no one is searching for, then it really doesn't matter how well you are optimized.

On page factors (things that you can do on the hub itself) - The title field is far and away the biggest factor. Heading fields are a distant second, and the density of the keywords you want to rank for is another small factor (years ago this was the major factor, which is why keyword stuffing used to be so popular)

Off page factors (things you do with the linking to the hub) - Considered by some to be 80% of a pages ability to rank, it comes down to links, basically the number of links and the anchor text in those links. It's important to note that the links can come from the same site as the page being linked to, such as Hubpages. The Page Rank of a site is Google's estimate of the importance of a site, and is a weighting factor in how much a link is worth to the receiving page. The most important thing you can do for any page to rank is to get lots of links with the anchor text that includes the terms you want to rank for.

Generally, pages with more backlinks will rank better than pages with fewer backlinks. And the anchor text will help determine what the pages ranks for (the anchor text is the words typically in blue that are the text associated with the link to the page.)

Since in Hubpages the title of the hub is used both as the title of the hub and as the anchor text for all the automatically generated links, you can see that choosing the keyword carefully for your title will have a huge impact on the terms a hub will rank for.

First - the obvious, it adds the text of the tag to your Hub. But while that can help, it is secondary to the other things that go on when you add tags.

Tag Pages - More importantly, tags are simply links to pages that are created with the tag as the header or title of the page. Click through to the tags on your hubs and you will find that you are on another page that lists all the hubs that have that tag on them. But, (and this is a big but) on Hubpages the tag pages only have 10 hubs listed on them (with links back to that hub). SOOO, if 10 or fewer hubs have that tag on them then you have a link back to your Hub from that tag page. Your hub now has a backlink, or some more Google love.

So, you have the possibility for every tag you add to get a backlink to your hub. That's the good news. So, why not add hundreds of tags? It turns out that there's limit to how effective this can be (not to mention that hubpages limits the number of tags, but as usual they are protecting you from doing something stupid.)

On one hand you could have a very popular tag. A tag like "how to" has almost 20000 hubs under it. But, for reasons related to how they manage the links, only about the top 10 to 40 "hot" hubs are on tag pages that will stick in the Google index and have any Page Rank. So, if you aren't in the top 20, you won't get much from it. Being on the 31st page of "how to" hubs does almost nothing for your rankings.

On the flip side, a tag like "dj+comet+01-46" only has 1 hub on it as of this writing. That tag page will likely not stay indexed and will have little Page Rank to link back to your hub. Overall, you're better off finding tags that have at least 3 or 4 hubs linking to them.

If you had dozens of tag links on your hub, the Page Rank that gets distributed to each one will be so diluted that you would have no hope of getting those tag pages to get and stay indexed with Google. And if you are writing a hub to get some link juice to an external page then adding dozens of links diluted the Page Rank that you are going to pass to the external link. So adding a huge number of tags will be self defeating as well.

Overall, you're better off finding tags that have at least 3 or 4 hubs linking to them, 10 to 20 is probably the sweet spot.

So, is adding a bunch of tags to your hub a good way to improve traffic to your hub? The answer is probably. Like anything, it depends on the competition and the number of similar hubs, and whether your goal is to do linking to pages off site.