Do you really need tags?
 

Do you really need tags for SEO or is it a waste of time?

what tags are you talking about ?

if you mean like on few tubes,
then yes., those are good.,
keyword links to categories or search results pages.,

They help.

I hope this link is related to your needs:
https://gfy.com/showthread.php?t=958464

I'm talking about the tags on blog posts.

And if you use the all in one seo plugin and set use tags as keywords does that even help since the search engines don't use keywords for ranking anymore?

no, words have no place in SEO

Wow.

Putting your Wordpress posts in categories and linking to them from your front page is bad.
Tagging your Wordpress posts and linking to them from your front page is good.

I just don't get it.