On duplicate key ignore?

Would suggest NOT using INSERT IGNORE as it ignores ALL errors (ie its a sloppy global ignore). Instead, since in your example tag is the unique key, use:

INSERT INTO table_tags (tag) VALUES ('tag_a'),('tab_b'),('tag_c')
ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE tag=tag;

on duplicate key produces:

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.07 sec)

Mysql has this handy UPDATE INTO command ;)

edit Looks like they renamed it to REPLACE

REPLACE works exactly like INSERT, except that if an old row in the table has the same value as a new row for a PRIMARY KEY or a UNIQUE index, the old row is deleted before the new row is inserted