Social Media and Web 2.0 Marketing

Over on the right hand side of these pages you’ll see a Tag Cloud. A Tag Cloud is a collection of tags that have been assigned to pages and posts on your blog. The bigger the word the more times it’s been tagged in your blog.

Why are Tags important?

1) They are great for Search Engine Optimisation. Search engines love to see a concise collection of words that directly reflect the content on your page.

2) They are good for your site visitors - they enable them to see quickly what your site is about and what’s important on your site.

3) They are good for site navigation. All the words tagged are hot linked to pages containing that tag. So a visitor wanting to quickly see what’s on your site about a particular tagged topic just needs to click on the Tag Cloud link.

4) They can help categorise your site content while it’s being pinged to your ping list.

It is strongly recommended that you add the plugin Simple Tags to your blog.  It’s easy enough to install although once installed there are many setting that can seem all a bit confusing… they did to me anyway.

I’ll try & go through some of the settings.

Various hooks get installed into your WordPress admin pages that allow configuration of the plugin. In the Admin pages there are 3 new menu items created under the Post option - these are “Manage Tags, Mass Edit Tags and Auto Tags”. When you add or edit a post or page there are a number of items added to the page: a box marked Tags (Simple Tags) top right and ‘Click tags’ & ‘Suggested Tags’ boxes at the bottom of the page. Then lastly on the Settings menu you’ll notice a new submenu “Simple Tags”

At the moment I’m only going to touch on a few of the settings I’ve configured and lead you through simply tagging a post. It’s a subject that warrants a much more detailed visit further down the line.

On the Settings/Simple Tags Options page I’ve made the following changes from default:

Embedded Tags Tab: Use Embedded Tags - Enabled

Tags for Current Post Tab: Automatically display tags list into post content - All

Related Posts Tab: Automatically display related posts into feeds - Enabled

Automatically display related posts into post content - Singleonly

Tag Cloud Tab: I changed the least & most popular colour to better suit my theme

When you come to make a post the easiest way I’m finding at the moment to tag it is: First write your text and then go down to the bottom of the page and click on ‘Suggested tags from: Tag the Net’. This looks at the page text you have written and creates a suggested list of tags. Now just click on the tags you want to use and each tag will get transferred to the Tags (Simple Tags) at the top of the page.

The tags shown in ‘Tags (Simple Tags)’ will get added to your page and incorporated into your ‘Tag Cloud’ when you publish the topic. If there are any keywords on the page that aren’t in your list and you think should be there just manually add them, separated by commas. The last thing to do is select all the keywords in the ‘Tags (Simple Tags) box’ and add them to your post between a [tags and /tags] - remember we enabled that option in the setting options menu. These will not be seen in your post but will be pinged to those sites in your ping list.

I know it seems like a lot of work but it isn’t really that difficult to set up & use and the rewards should be well worth it.

Tags: blog, Cloud, Clouds, configuration, keywords, link, navigation, Optimisation, plugin, search engine, SEO, tag cloud

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