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I have a list of tags associated to a page. Currently, those tags link through to a search page of other pages sharing that tag.
This is the view from an individual page:
I don't think this behaviour is obvious and I am struggling to either make it clear or find another behaviour that make sense.
What would make the most sense here and how do I make that clear to the user?
Overall, rather than thinking "tags" when you create your interface, it might be more useful to consider the context of your user's view of your site which is: "to investigate other accommodation with similar attributes" - which, effectively, is what you're using the user interface pattern of "tagging" to do.
I can see two issues here:
The title "Tags" will not mean much to a non-expert user
The tags don't look like links
I ask myself "Will my mum know what a 'tag' is, or how it works?" - I'm using the example of my Mum because it looks like your site is promoting accommodation and she's probably your audience.
Go back to basics first/ Just because you're using the UI pattern of "tags" doesn't mean you have to label the User Interface as such. A suggested title for your tag list might be "Find other places like this", or "Find other places like [title of current accommodation]"
Further, it's not obvious to a visitor that your tags are click-able. So, from a design standpoint, start with a list of links or buttons - i.e. something that invites the user to click - and work up from there (never losing sight of the fact that the links must look click-able).
If you want to highlight there is an action for tags, you should underline them (you can used dashed underline if you want 'lighter UI').
To highlight it does a search I would add Magnifying glass icon into the tag, that will show only on hover.
Exposed Tags are often over used by more technically minded UX people as an alternative to other forms of navigation. For example many real world users don't realise how tags really work in gmail, but don't need to for it to work.
The standard approach for search is to have facets that used values of a value (such as colour or task) to allow the user to reduce the amount of items they are seeing. The values are ever numeric or effectively tags added to the product management system.
I would recommend exposing tags to users only for sites where there are a lot of similar type of items/content, such as blogs or photo sites. Behind the scenes tags, if grouped and organised well, can become vital meta data that drives the structure, navigation and search for a site.
So in your case I would ditch the term tags and replace it with the concept of filters. See Air BnB for a great example of this.
