Simple Tags is a WordPress plugin that doesn’t need much of an introduction. Many users are familiar with this plugin because it’s often one of those plugins that you download as soon as you start using WordPress. With all of its features and functionality, it really should be automatically included with every WordPress installation.
Why do you need a tag management plugin?
Once you accumulate a lot of tags on your blog, you can really appreciate a management tool such as Simple Tags because editing tags for posts and pages on an individual basis can be a real pain. This plugin also helps you with finding the right tags to include in your content, it helps to display tags on your posts and pages with a cloud or organized lists, plus it even helps to optimize your content with internal links to tag pages.
Let’s take a look at everything the Simple Tags WordPress plugin can do.
Simple Tags Menu
Once installed, you’ll find the “Simple Tags” sub-menu located under the Settings menu. This is the first place you’ll want to start after installing the plugin.
Features
The features tab is where you can enable/disable different features of the plugin.
- Auto link tags – will automatically link tags in your post to their tag page.
- Mass edit terms – lets you edit a large amount of tags and categories for any taxonomy.
- Click tags – displays links for all of your tags in the post editor, you can then click the ones you want to add them to your post.
- Auto-complete – after you enter a specific amount of characters, tags that begin with the same characters will appear so that you can easily select them.
- Suggested tags – adds a section to your post editor that will suggest tags for your post from your local database, Yahoo! Term Extraction API, OpenCalais, Alchemy, Zemanta, and Tag The Net.
- Advanced manage terms – edit, merge, delete, and add terms for any taxonomy.
- Related posts by term – display related posts for your content based on related terms.
- Auto terms posts – automatically add terms to your content by proceeding to a search within the content.
- Tags for pages – add tags to your pages and add pages to tags search.
- Tag cloud short code – will display a cloud tag, once you add the short code to your blog theme.
Administration
Under the Administration tab, you can customize a few features even further. For instance, you can change the tag input type (for your post) from “input” (single line) to text area (multi-line). You can also choose the minimum amount of characters for the auto-completion feature. If you want auto-complete to work as soon as you start typing a character (tags will be appear below the input area), just leave it at zero.
You can also change the click tags order and enter your API keys for OpenCalais, Alchemy, and Zemanta. Above I mentioned that you can enable a feature that will suggest tags from other services. In order to use the 3 above-mentioned services, you’ll have to enter an API key, which you can create for free at those prospective websites.
Tag Cloud
This sections offers numerous options for customizing your tag cloud, should you choose to enable and use it on your blog. You can customize the tag order, cloud type, link format, colors, and more.
Tags for Current Post
A neat feature that you can enable here, is the ability to display a tags list in your RSS feds. You can also automatically display a tags list on your blog, homepage, single posts, or pages.
There are options here for customizing your tags list as well such as the separator string, text to display before tags list, text to display after tags list, and more.
Meta Keyword & Related Tags
These two features have actually been removed because they weren’t really important, plus there are better plugins for them. There are suggestions here for plugins that you can use to get these features.
Mass Edit Terms & Auto Terms
Under the Tools menu, you’ll find two new sub-menus added by Simple Tags: Mass Edit Terms and Auto Terms.
Mass Edit Terms
Mass Edit terms is a place where you can edit tags and categories for up to 200 posts or pages all at once! You’ll see your post title and then an input area for tags. Your current tags for that post will already be displayed here and you can add, remove, or edit as needed.
Auto Terms
“This feature allows WordPress to look into post content and title for specified terms when saving posts.” If your post content or title contains any keyword that you have in your auto terms list, the plugin will automatically add that keyword as a term for the post.
There are a couple of options here that you can check off, like the ability to auto-tag only posts without terms and the ability to also use your local terms database.
Post Editor Additions
Finally, you’ll notice some additional features in the post editor: suggested tags from, tags (Simple Tags), and click tags. As mentioned above, Suggested tags displays tags from various services in addition to your local database. Tags (Simple Tags) is simply the place to enter your post tags. Click tags display all of your tags to make it easier to add to your post – no typing necessary.
So as you can see, Simple Tags is absolutely a must-have for managing tags, enhancing your content, and quickly adding tags to your posts. Plus, if you use custom taxonomies on your blog, this plugin makes it easy to manage tags and categories for those as well. It may seem a little complicated, but once you get starting using it you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.
Link: Simple Tags
