Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) is described by its author as a “a multi-headed hydra of a plugin”, but unfortunately, having hinted at both its complexity and its potential, she offers very little in the way of narrative about her creation. This article is not intended as a comprehensive guide to UTW, but it should get you started.

Possible confusion begins with the terminology. “Tags” is used in the WordPress codex to refer to the placeholders located in templates so that dynamic information is displayed to your visitors. But from the perspective of UTW, “tags” means keywords which are assigned to each article to allow finer definitions than are generally available by the use of categories alone.

This explanation prompts the obvious question: why not just define more categories and/or sub-categories? The answer is that the majority of your visitors will not thank you if they have to peruse a list of 50 categories or if it takes more than 2-3 clicks at most to reach the content for which they are looking. It is therefore better to keep a quite short list of main categories and - if you use child categories at all - restrict their number (per parent category) even more. Off-topic, but worth mentioning is that yes, this limitation implies you should think very carefully before choosing your categories and subsequently make sure you allocate your posts to the most relevant categories (you can place a post in one, or as many categories as you wish).

Many visitors will be perfectly satisfied to browse via the category and archived (date) links, but just as some will use the search box, others will appreciate tags. In fact you could think of UTW tags as search boxes which have already been filled in. Let’s say for example you write a post which belongs in “Cars” and “Ford”, it may be relevant to add tags to that post of “experimental”, “hybrid”, “fuel efficient”. Clicking on one of those tags can pull up a page listing all the posts which have been similarly tagged, just as if the word had been entered in the search box.

The observant will have noticed that the word “can” was emphasized. That is because it is your choice whether tags point at off-site or on-site links and the decision as to which way to go depends largely on the type of site you have. If it is a resource site you may well be happy to include off-site links in order to make your site as useful as possible. For most other site types, internal links may be more appropriate.

Having mentioned off-site links, this is as good a place as any to also mention Technorati, a directory which lists sites based on the tags they display. Others such as Delicous operate this way, and although the traffic generated by these directories will vary according to the type of site you have and your skill at using tags, they can be substantial traffic sources. Another reason to use tags and a tool like UTW for working with them. Technorati - an article topic in its own right - does not require tags to point to it (they can be internal links or links to other third-party sites). You can even hide your tags if you think they clutter your pages and your visitors will not use them. For entry into its directory, Technorati only requires that your site and/or your pages is/are tagged.

The third reason to use tags is that once you have waded through the headache-inducing preliminaries, they are actually very easy to use and add an additional mechanism for helping search engines spider your blog as completely as possible. They also, by their existence, add extra relevant keywords to your site or reinforce those you are already targeting.

Summary of this article so far

• Tags in this context are context-relevant keywords, user-selected on a per-post basis.
• They provide an additional way for surfers to navigate site(s).
• They are a must-have for listing in directories such as Technorati.
• They provide further paths by which traditional search engines can spider site(s).

Before getting to the nitty-gritty of install and use, UTW has a further function which requires only an option box to be checked: namely that of automatically creating and inserting keyword meta tags for pages displaying list of tags and for single post pages. However that leaves the keyword meta missing on all other pages (a strange omission by WordPress even granted that this meta is not as powerful as in the past) and nothing taking care of the description meta tag at all. This plugin will solve all those problems and the same author has a useful page about keyword selection which will be a worthwhile read for many.

Installing and using UTW

The UTW plugin is installed as usual: download, unzip to your PC and then FTP the folder to your wp-content/plugins directory. Then activate the plugin from your WordPress admin, which will create a “Tags” link in both “Manage” and “Options”. Included on the Tags page are links to help files which have been installed on your own server and cover all the basic configuration and use issues, plus a link to the help pages on the author’s site.

As with most things WordPress, you are unlikely to actually break anything by testing the various options for yourself to see what they actually produce. But there are essentially two options for displaying tags and you can use one or both. The first is to display tags within posts by inserting [tag][/tag] around the keyword(s) you want to be treated as tags. The second, which you active via the tags management page, is to have tags automatically displayed at the end of each post.

The problem with this latter option is that they are displayed hard on the end of the post and styling does not always resolve that. Better, in my opinion, to set the automatic options off and add a line similar to this to the relevant template(s):

<div class="tags">Tags: <?php UTW_ShowTagsForCurrentPost("commalist") ?>

“ShowTagsForCurrentPost” is one of many ways of calling tags to be displayed according to certain parameters and in a particular format (and you control the styling through the class setting and your own CSS file). There are many more options on this page. You might also choose to display Technorati tags and related tags (although I prefer theRelated Entries plugin to the latter possibility):

<div class="tags">Technorati Tags: <?php UTW_ShowTagsForCurrentPost("technoraticommalist") ?><br />
Related Tags: <?php UTW_ShowRelatedTagsForCurrentTagSet("commalist") ?></div>

“Tag Clouds” can be created with UTW. These are ways of displaying all the tags on a site, using color and/or font size to highlight the tags which are used most often. The logic being that these links will return the most results. A good example can be found by scrolling down a screen on this page at Flickr. At the risk of offending some visitors, my personal opinion is that tag clouds are too geeky, not sufficiently intuitive for the average visitor to most sites. Therefore I usually think of them either as an additional means of navigation to be displayed fairly discreetly, or - more often - as primarily as giving the SE’s another way to find my more deeply buried pages. As such, placing the code to appear only at the very bottom of my home page is my most common choice, but however you do it, this is the code to use:

<div class="tagcloud"><?php UTW_ShowWeightedTagSetAlphabetical("coloredsizedtagcloud","","0") ?></div>

Once again most of the display style is controlled by your own style settings, but the font sizes and colors are set on the Tags –> Configuration page in your WordPress admin. The zero in that link says “display all tags” and replacing that with a positive number will impose a limit on the number of tags displayed. My example link is only one of many options: you can display graphs and bar charts, as well as other forms of tag cloud by choosing other link structures from the predefined formats page.

As mentioned above, I strongly recommend you try out different settings and different display formats, so you can actually see what they do. But these are the configuration settings I usually employ, that you can take as a starting point if you wish:

• Use url rewriting for local tag urls (/tag/tag instead of index.php?tag=tag) = checked
• Base url = /tag/
• Include trailing slash on tag urls = checked
• Include meta keywords = checked (unless using the Maxpower plugin mentioned above)
• Use embedded tags = checked (whether I plan to use them or not)
• Include debugging information = unchecked
• Include local tag links in feeds = unchecked
• Automatically include primary tag links = No (explained above)
• Automatically include secondary tag links = No (explained above)
• The tag cloud settings should reflect the colors of your theme and the placement of the tags. I often have my sizes set at 70% and 250% but that will not be right in many cases. Experiment!
• Show existing tags on post editing page = checked (although this can become tiresome)
• Automatically add categories as tags = checked

The last part of the process is that of adding tags to posts. As noted already you can put [tag][/tag] around keyword(s) and/or add tags to be displayed separately. After UTW is active, under your posting box will be a box for entering a comma-separated list of keywords (tags) for the post in question. You can do this manually and/or with some help from Yahoo. A couple of potential gotchas here. The first is that UTW also offers the same service from Tagyu, but Tagyu closed their site recently. The second is that the Yahoo button does not always work in Explorer: you may need to use a browser such as Firefox or Opera, to be to get tag suggestions reliably from Yahoo.

Last but not least, for Technorati to pick up multi-word tags, it is recommended that you join the words with an underscore - blue_car for example - and of course, if you are going for Technorati listings, make sure you use tags which exist in Technorati. That is another story for another day.

Update!

Since this article was written, both WordPress and UTW have gone through several versions and not all of them wanted to co-exist. However this site was updated in April 2007 and at the time of adding this comment, is running - without any problems - WordPress 2.1.3 and the latest version of Ultimate Tag Warrior.