A Place For Stephen

Tags

As a newbie to this field, I had little understanding of what tags were all about, and the importance of using them… until I started fiddling.

Think of a list of tags as a list of keywords / keyphrases which describe each and every post you make! For example, this post could have these tags (and more) to help describe it:

• Plug-ins
  
• WordPress Plug-ins
  
• Askimet
  
• Tagging
  
• Tag
  
• Tag Clouds
  

So once you install the tag plug-ins I’m about to list, get into the habit of tagging each post AS YOU WRITE IT!

Why? Well there’s a few VERY good reasons to do this:

1. WordPress can link to the tags used in your site, to show all the posts relevant to that tag – it’s a bit like a keyword search, but one which you control.
   
2. And that ALSO means there are lots of “instant” extra pages that the search engines can pick up to direct people to your site.
   
3. But even better… sites like technorati pick up your “tags” and list your post on their site under the matching tag! It’s brilliant, and I didn’t know about it until I found a post of mine in google just days after doing it… and then back tracked to technorati.

But I’ve got “categories” you say… can’t I just file the post in multiple categories? Well you can still do that (within reason), but tagging gives you the ability to file a post under as many appropriate tags/kewords as you like… a lot more flexible!

Ultimate Tag Warrior

So the ultimate tag plugin would be… Ultimate Tag Warrior. Check out the install and usage docs on the web site for full details on how to use it! After you unzip the file, upload the UltimateTagWarrior folder (contained in the plugins folder), to your WordPress plugins folder.

The configuration for UTW is a little difficult – OPTIONS/TAGS – but these minimal settings will get it happening for you…

Under Primary Content Tags, next to Automatically include primary tag links, select After Content to show your tags after the post.

Under Global Formatting Settings, remove the words NO TAGS from the last option.

Finully, right at the bottom under Editing Options, select Dropdown to show a list of tags you’ve already entered so you can use them in a new post. And then SAVE your settings.

As far as the URL settings are concerned at the top – I’ve tried turning the url rewriting on, but for some reason I can’t get it to work on my server. Try it on yours, and then, when you click on a tag, if you DON’T get an error – leave it on:)

The other settings… well I haven’t had time to explore them yet, but these ones will get tagging working for you in a big way.

And if you’ve already entered some posts at this stage, now go back and MANAGE/POSTS/EDIT them to add appropriate tags…

Next up… our final initial plug-ins… Click on the next page below…

Popularity: 16% [?]

Pages: 1 2 3 4