I’ve previously discussed the Akismet and Share This plugins for WordPress, and my third “can’t live without it” plugin is Ultimate Tag Warrior, created by Christine Davis. Like most WordPress plugins, this one is easy to use and a joy to see in action. Tags, the most commonly used of what are known as Microformats, were made especially popular by blogs, bloggers and the king of blog search, Technorati. As I write this, Google Blog Search has probably just overtaken Technorati in popularity, unless that happened last month and I missed the headlines.

At any rate, tags are a simple, semantic tool to let readers know what a post or article is about. For instance, I might tag this post “tags” or “microformats”, to let everyone out there reading (there are millions of you, right?) know what the post is about. In fact, I think I will do just that, so look for those tags at the bottom of this post.

From an SEO perspective, tags are yummy candy for Google and other search engines, which seem to slurp (no relation to Yahoo’s “Slurp” spider) them up quickly, as they do just about all blog content. Ultimate Tag Warrior makes adding tags to posts easy and creates tag pages as well, so that when a user clicks on a given tag for a post, he or she is taken to a “tag page” that lists all of the posts in your blog that are associated with that particular tag. It’s basically another archiving system for WordPress, which is already heavily-organized by categories and the calendar.

To use Ultimate Tag Warrior, first download it from Christine’s site. After doing so, and unzipping the plugin, upload the entire “UltimateTagWarrior” folder to your WordPress plugins folder and activate it from the “Plugins” module of the Dashboard. After you’ve done this, the tool will be activated, but you’ll have to change various setting. To do so, click the “Options” link in the dashboard and then “Tags” (UTW actually adds its own little options section - it’s that advanced).

There are many options that you can use with UTW, but the settings I most often use include the “Use url rewriting for local tag urls (/tag/tag instead of index.php?tag=tag)” and the “Meta Keywords” addition. The latter will create meta keywords from the tags for a given post. Though this is something of a throwback from 1999-era SEO practices, I still like to have meta keywords in my blog pages, and there is some evidence that they serves as “guides” for the search engines when they are used properly, i.e. - not abused. There are many other options with UTW as well, including an option to add a tag cloud. I actually use this on one site, but I’ll let you decide if you want to do that and figure out how to do it. But wait…you didn’t think I’d leave you like that, with no resources to figure it out, did you? Here you go: Help me make a tag cloud, foo’.

Rather than write all the steps to add the tag cloud, I figure I’ll let you read it from the source. Good luck with UTW, and kudos to Christine Davis, who really put together something special here.

Tags: microformats, seo, tags, technorati, ultimate tag warrior, wordpress, wordpress plugins

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