Greenguy's Board - Chasing the Walrus

In this post I am going to try to explain the use of categories and tags as well as using those tags as your meta keywords. Tags and keywords can be thought of interchangeably. Tags are the keywords that you use in your post. For clarity sake, when I refer to tags I will be referring to your posts keywords. From this point on if I use the term keyword, I will be referring to meta-keywords used in the head of your pages. Therefore, tags are for surfers and keywords are for search engines.

Since XXX Blog Maniac is a mature blog, I will use it rather than Chasing the Walrus simply because you can actually see things in action. But be warned, I'm not smart enough to follow my own advice most of the time. I have a tendency to blog about what's on my mind at the time and then try to make up for no porn terms by using tags to describe the action in the video.

I use categories as just that a means to categorize my posts. Since I consider XXX Blog Maniac as a general porn blog, my categories are quite similar to your typical blog directory or link list. But even if you are running a more niched blog, you can still find meaningful categories to use. If it were, say a amateur blog, then you could have categories like blonde, brunette, red-head, big boobs, little ones, etc.

On the other hand, tags should be used to describe the action in or specific point of the post. Most of you already know this but I found some simple things to think about when choosing tags and meta keywords on Simple SEO and am quoting from there:

Quote:

# Try to figure out what someone would type into Google in order to find your site / identify what you have written about. This could be one word or a string of words (a phrase);

# Avoid using the same keyword repeatedly to describe all your content as it makes one post hard to distinguish from another. Repeating the same meta keyword several times may have its ranking decreased by a search engine trying to eliminate this practice;

# Avoid using ‘adult’ words or phrases unless your page is adult in nature. Doing otherwise may make search engines miscategorize your hard work or cause SE’s to not index your content at all;

# If you are competing in SE position, look at the meta tag keywords your competitors use. Maybe they have better identified the words or phrases people are using to search;

# Don’t use a competitors trademark, it could get you in trouble with the lawyers. For example, suppose you make shoes. Don’t put Nike in as your keywords because then you would be competing for them using their own name;
# Avoid using irrelevant words or phrases (the, is, click here, or, and);

# Ensure that whatever keywords or phrases you choose occur within the body of the page (the actual content). If the keywords don’t match the content, this could raise a flag in search engine algorithms;

# Don’t be afraid to go back and edit the keywords and tags of an old post;

Ever since I started using it, I've been a big fan of Ultimate Tag Warrior and last week while looking around for meta tag plugins for grandmascrotum (not that my help was needed) I found a plug-in that works hand in hand with UTW, Tags in the Head. I thought I'd use the rest of this post to cover how I set-up UTW and configure the new TIH plug-in.

Download the UTW plug-in, upload it to your wp-content/plugins folder per instructions. The plugin also comes with 4 template pages. I copy tag.php, tags.php and searchtags.php into my theme template. I discard header.php I described the usage for these template pages in my first post.

Go into your WP-Admin, click on plug-ins and enable UTW 3.14x. I do not enable the UTW 1.3 legacy or the UTW Archive. Then click on options / tags.

This is how I setup the plug-in for use on my blogs. It may not be the best and definitely is not the only way to do it.

Configuration:
URL Settings:

Use url rewriting for local tag urls - check

Base URL - /tag/

Include trailing slash on tag urls - check

Note: if you wanted to point your tags somewhere other than internally, such as to technorati for example, you would not check URL rewriting and set the base URL to technorati (http://www.technorati.com/tag/

Meta Keywords:

Include meta keywords - unchecked

Note: If you want the plug-in to automaticly add tags to your single posts and tag pages you would check this. Since I'm going to use tags in the head I'll un-check it.

Embedded Tags:

Use embedded tags - check

Note: this enables using a tagging method made popular by one of the earliest tagging plug-ins, Simple Tags. By simply surrounding your tag like such [tag]tag[/tag], UTW will pick that up as a tag and link it as such inside the post. Common blogger folklore has it that this is an effective means of SEO

Debugging:

Include debugging information - unchecked

Automatic Feed Tags:

Include local tag links in feeds - checked

Note: Adds linked tags to your RSS feed.

Primary Content Tags:
I leave all these settings at default

Secondary Content Tags:
I leave all these settings at default

Global Formatting Settings:
If your using a tag cloud either as a page or as another addition to your blog, these are used to format the look of the tag cloud. Otherwise you can ignore these and leave at the default.

Editing Options

Show existing tags on post editing page - dropdown

Note: This shows up on your post page and works in conjunction with how you setup your template. I like the dropdown menu as it seems easier to navigate if you have a long tag list.

Automatically add categories as tags - unchecked

Note: Since I use both category links and tags I leave this unchecked to help with duplicate content issues.

Click save and then click on the manage tags link. This is a page for managing your tags, check it out. The only thing I've ever used this for is sometimes screw up on tags in the post and end up with some really funky tags that I delete.

If this is an initial install or if you changed anything in URL settings go to Options / Permalinks and update your permalink structure.
Note: Anytime you have 404 problems with posts start with permalinks. Try updating them. If that doesn't solve your problem, delete .htaccess, add a blank .htaccess, chmod it to 666 and try again. This will solve 90% of your 404 problems.

Formatting single.php and index.php
The documentation for this is pretty good so check it out. If you have any questions feel free to post them and I'll be more than happy to answer them. I use "tags for the current post" and "related posts for the current post"

Also, tag clouds are not for everyone. If you need help with them let me know.

Tags in the Head
Upload the plugin and then go to plug-ins and activate. Go to options.tags in the head and setup your keywords for pages that don't have tags, the number of characters from you post to be used as the description on single pages and the meta description for the pages.

The weakness I see with this plug-in is with the way it uses categories so I will do my meta descriptions and meta keywords manually for these.