Simple Tagging Plugin for WordPress: Highly Recommended
If your blog is on WordPress and are looking for a tagging plugin, look no further. Simple tagging plugin by Michael is a great plugin for tagging your posts and works very well with WordPress. This plugin is based on Jerome’s Keyword’s Plugin but is extended with more features and is much easier to work with when compared to Ultimate Tag Worrior (UTW) plugin.
Is Tagging better than using Categories?
Yes! Tagging provides with many advantages that categories can not. Let’s look at the some of the advantages because of which I am moving away from categories to tagging.
- I can have any number of tags and associate the posts on this site with tag words that matches very close to the subject of the post. For example take this post. I can use tag words ‘WordPress’, ‘WordPress plugin’, ‘Tagging’ and ‘Blog’ that matches very close to the subject of this post. And moreover since the plugin provides automatic recommendations, I don’t miss the tags which I should be using.
- I can even use both tagging and categories for more effective results. For example, I can put a post on ‘basic unix commands’ in the category of Operating Systems and tag the post with tags such as ‘Linux’, ‘Solaris’ and ‘HP-UX’. If I were to use only categories, I had to create 4 different categories for that one post. Getting the point?
- Since I have claimed this blog on Technorati, it’s one more reason and another advantage to tag my posts. Why? – Technorati has over 10 millions tags and that leaves me with plenty of opportunities to attract lot of traffic from Technorati’s search using different tags.
Features of Simple Tagging Plugin
The Simple Tagging Plugin offers the following features:
- Lets you import the tags from UTW, Jerome’s plugin and you can also import the existing WordPress categories as tags.
- Just beneath your editor, you get another text box that you can use for creating and associating tags with your posts.
- You will be delighted to note that this plugin offers auto completion of tag names as you type its name in the text field (Michael calls it Type-Ahead feature). If you have lot of tags, this feature is a great time saver.
- It displays tags in the posts and also has feature to show related posts depending on the common tags between posts. Using the ‘related posts’ feature will display some related posts to your current post and keep your visitors stay for longer duration on the site.
- It can add your tags as categories to your feeds which can then be indexed by Technorati. I find this feature very useful since Technorati will also be able to use my Tags as categories in its own search engine.
- This plugin can also display related tags in del.icio.us style and show a tag cloud.
- And finally, it can add your post specific tags to the META Keywords header tag which is very helpful too.
Installation and Configuration
The instructions to install and configure Simple Tagging plugin that are available on Michael’s website are self explanatory and require no further mention. One thing you must notice here is that since I use ‘Add Meta plugin‘ by George Notaras, I had to configure the ‘Add Meta’ plugin to not add the keywords from post to META headers. Instead, I configured Simple Tagging plugin to append the tags as the keywords in the META header of single posts.
So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and start using tags today!
» Links: [Simple Tagging Plugin], [Author's Website]
4 Responses to “Simple Tagging Plugin for WordPress: Highly Recommended”
I use the UTW Plugin in Txt – it has a feature that was very important for me – the abilty to specify the tags in the content. You can put the tags in [tags][/tags] inside the post and the post will be tagged with those tags.
Does Simple Tagging support this option?
Yes Binny, Simple Tagging does support that. Importantly, it does not slow down your blog like UTW does.
Sorry to be so late on this – I am intrigued by this plugin, and yours seems to be the only site making a lengthy comparison with UTW.
My question is this: Isn’t the major difference between the two the fact that UTW bases its tag suggestions on the Yahoo Search Engine? So it scans your post for relevant words, compares it to relevant Yahoo keywords, and delivers a list of suggested tags based on those keywords. I would have thought that puts it streets ahead of Simple Tagging, which basically suggests tags based on the post alone.
Any thoughts on this?
Hi Rory,
Sorry for replying late on this. Using any kind of tagging plugin that gives you the ability to add tags easily and recall existing tags at the time of adding tags to the posts is what I consider as the single most important factor. If UTW suggests the keywords from Yahoo, it hardly matters to me as Google brings in majority of traffic to my website. Yahoo is still learning to index stuff from blogs, so it really doesn’t matter if you use UTW or Simple Taggin, just make sure that it’s easy on you to use it in long run.