Alex Pooley's Blog

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The Ultimate Tag Warrior

Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) is the mother of all blog navigational aids. The idea is that you associate tags (keywords) with posts so that you can automatically correlate related posts. You can display the tags you’ve assigned for each post, related posts, and you can also display a sorted aggregate (tag cloud) of all the tags. The purpose of organizing your posts in this way is to make it easier for your readers to find material that interests them.

The related posts is an absolute must have feature for me. This information is particularly important for people who are not yet dedicated readers of your blog and found their way to a post on your site through search engines, online social networks, etc. By appending related posts to the end of your posts, you will aid new readers to not only find further information on their topic, but also to determine if your blog content is to their taste.

UTW has a heaps of configurable stuff and a lot can be configured through the UTW options configuration panel. Unfortunately if you want to access the true power of the plugin then you need to pass parameters to PHP calls inside your wordpress template. Take the tag clouds for example. Some of you may be familiar with tag clouds where the font size gets larger for more popular tags. With UTW you have this option, but you also have the option of create a colored tag cloud, a colored and sizable tag cloud, and maybe other options (there’s heaps). For my purposes the tag clouds with different font sizes is too large for my side bars.

While UTW can help organize your onsite content, it’s also possible to use UTW to help optimize your offsite exposure by using tags as meta keywords. I don’t think Google bothers with meta keywords these days, but I’m sure plenty of other search engines do.

Another feature worth mentioning is that you can very easily embed your tags in feeds by selecting a check box in the configuration GUI.

Anyway, that’s the Ultimate Tag Warrior. I’ve only touched on a few key points and I encourage you to try it out for yourself. This plugin is probably the most feature packed, and professional plugins I’ve come across.

Download Ultimate Tag Warrior

Update: I just wrote a post about how to make money online from your blog. Check it out!

This is the second article in my series of favorite Wordpress plugins. My previous post in the series was on the SEO Title Tag plugin.

The Sociable Wordpress Plugin
Social networks really took off in 2006. These social networks can often act as amplifiers as links and blogs reverberate through out the social network. The Sociable plugin helps social network members action a post right there and then while reading your post. You can see the sociable plugin as the list of icons at the bottom of each of my posts. While I haven’t received a huge number of social “recommendations”, each recommendation has created 5+ visits by others to the blog and in some cases much better.

If you install this plugin you should also read some SEO advice from Andy Beard regarding the sociable plugin.

Update: I just wrote a post about how to make money online from your blog. Check it out!

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve jazzed up my blog a bit. I’ve installed ratings icons, tag lists, related posts, social network links, the list goes on. Installing some of these plugins put my thinking in a new direction so I thought I would share my experience through a series of posts (unimaginatively) entitled: “My Favorite Wordpress Plugins”. The series will describe practical plugins you can add to your blog to improve the quality of the blog, and in return, enjoy more traffic. If you are serious about your blog and you don’t have these plugins, then you are really missing out.

Note that I’m only going to describe the plugins and why they are of interest to you. I’m not going to describe how to install them as each plugin comes with comprehensive documentation.

I’ll start the series off with arguably the most important plugin…

The SEO Title Tag Wordpress Plugin

Update: I confused myself while writing this and said that my blog used to be titled “Alex Pooley’s Blog”, but the default Wordpres blog title is your blog name followed by the post title. SEO Title Tag will switch the order, and/or remove the name of your blog from the title.

There are some plugins that sit pretty in the limelight while other plugins do the dirty work without recognition. The SEO Title Tag plugin is a dirty worker. All it does is set the HTML title element value to the title of the post currently being viewed. So instead of each page being titled “Alex Pooley’s Blog”, each page is titled with something more fitting. Check out random pages in my blog and you will see the title of each post in your browser window bar.

Accurate titles are really important from a search engines perspective. A search engine only has a limited amount of information to determine what a page is about, and the title element is often considered one of the most important bits of information. Say I had a post about “Wordpress Plugins” and the page was titled, “Alex Pooley’s Blog”, that’s obviously one less hint to the search engines as to the content of my post.

I should also note that the front page of the blog is still the title of your blog, unless you configure otherwise in the plugin options page. A couple of other things in the plugin configuration you may like to look at, like appending your blog name to the end of each title.

If you only install one plugin this Christmas, make sure you install this one. You can grab the plugin from netconcepts.

Update: I just wrote a post about how to make money online from your blog. Check it out!