Art of Blogging

Since I started using Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 I have been very pleased with this plugin for creating Tag Clouds.

Of course, there are things I would like to see added or changed, but I didn’t spend the time writing the plugin or its well laid out documentation. I have no complaints!

What I do have are a couple of pointers for its’ use for a new user.

First off, take a quick peek at my article on Ultimate Tag Warrior As An SEO Tool and you will maybe see where part of the problem comes into play.

The Keyword Suggestion tool is a script. It will grab words and phrases that are odd or different, and yet similar to others you may already have. For instance, take “blog” and “blogs”. Can you see how this is me working hard at diluting my own relevance?

It gets better of course. Along the way, I discovered that UTW3 takes spaces between keyword and inserts an underscore. For example, “publishing tips”. This gets turned into “publishing_tips” by the script. In my haste, I did not look closely at what was really going on. So, looking at “publishing_tips” I said, “yuck!” And made it “publishing-tips”.

The tag selector is NOT a tag editor.

So, now I have “publishing_tips” AND “publishing-tips” and to add insult to injury, they both show as “publishing tips” in the Tag Cloud.

Through the Tag plugin admin, I can delete tags. The problem here is I will orphan some articles. So, first I have to migrate all the articles from the doomed tag to the other one. Then I can delete the tag from the plugin.

It would be nice to have an interface for doing this in the admin. I think I can probably do it simply enough on a database level though, so don’t expect me making that mod.

Instead, I will take my own advice and learn from my experience and not go creating tags randomly. Instead, I will use some thought and not create both the blog and blogs tag unless it really is important to have the distinction.

I also hope to someday fully grasp that what you see in an admin view is not always what is seen on the front end.

Another thing is if your blog article is really long, the Keyword Suggestion tool can’t handle it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Blog Tools, Blog Plugins, Blog Tips, Howto Blog, WordPress MU, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.