Alex Pooley's Blog

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More people search for wikis than blogs. This is one metric I use to gauge general growth. Check out what Google’s Keyword Tool has to say about [wiki] using the “Search Volume Trends” setting in the combo box.

OK, so maybe wikis are searched for more than blogs because of the nature of their use rather than their popularity. Whatever the case, searches on the up and that’s important for those with an eye on the long tail + SEO.

The graph above was created by Google Trends. Trends are created by analysing searches made through Google. Click on the graph above to see the results in Google Trends.

Happy hunting!

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!