Changing tags from underscores to dashes for SEO

The following tutorial covers the process of quickly and easily changing or converting your WordPress Tags from using an underscore _ to a dash – for search engine optimization. Google and other search engines do not recognize an underscore _ as a space and therefore will merge multiple keyword phrases into a singular word which is not what you want for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your keyword tag phrases. To fix this we can use a dash which is a space recognizable character.

If you have migrated from Ultimate Tag Warrior to Simple Tags, this tutorial is for you.

Globally Replacing Tag Underscores with Dashes:

1. Login to your phpMyAdmin section from cPanel or equivelant
2. Locate and select your WordPress database from the phpMyAdmin sidebar
3. Click the SQL tab from the menu, insert the following lines and click go to apply the changes:
   
update wp_terms set slug = replace(slug,'_','-');
update wp_terms set name = replace(name,'_',' ');
update wp_tags set tag = replace(tag,'_','-');

4. If all goes well, your tags should have been converted from example_text_tag to example-text-tag
5. Now you will need to add some information to your .htaccess file to redirect the old tag searches to the new tags. You can find this information in the following tutorial…

Using .htaccess to redirect underscores _ to dashes –