Combining Ultimate Tag Warrior With Jerome’s Keywords WordPress Plugins – Meet Tags in the Head

As many of you know, I think Christine Davis’ Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin is awesome. And I adore Jerome’s Keywords, so much so that when the two wouldn’t work together, with Christine’s help, we came up with a solution so everyone can use both.

Well, Kirk Montgomery of Max Power has come up with the Tags in the Head WordPress Plugin which combines the best of both worlds and takes it a step further.

Tags in the Head features include simple ease of use and installation, detailed instructions, the ability to harvest tags for use as keywords from both Ultimate Tag Warrior and Jerome’s Keywords, internal error and logic checking, ability to customize the meta descriptions for your homepage, archives, 404 pages, and every post, and everything validates XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

…UTW is a great way to organize information found within my website, but it doesn’t do much for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Conversely, SEO is often aimed at making it easier for search engines to analyse your site, but doesn’t necessarily make it easy for people to read and interact with your site. Tags in the Head bridges these two ideas: simple SEO techniques and the practice ‘tagging’ pages with keywords.

…Meta keywords are specially formatted strings of text found within your website that contain information about each page. In an ideal world, these tags tell search engines what your page is about. The meta-Keywords tags are words that are important and describe the content found on any given page, see Simple SEO: Choosing Keywords and Tags.

At this point you may already be confused — meta-tags, keywords, tags, which one is which? To emphasize: meta keyword tags tell search engines what is on your page, while tags (via UTW and JKW) make finding content easier on your site by assigning keywords to each page that describe it in someway. You may have noticed: there is very little difference between meta keywords and tags. The only real difference is one of placement: meta tags go in the head of a page, while keyword tags are visible to users for navigation.

In order to use the Tags in the Head WordPress Plugin, you must be using the full version of WordPress, preferably the latest version, and have one or both Ultimate Tag Warrior and/or Jerome’s Keywords installed. Install and activate the Plugin and edit your header.php template file in your WordPress Theme to add the PHP code and functions in the head of your template file.

The PHP code to paste into your blog does not currently include a conditional to test if the Plugin is activated, but I’ve asked the WordPress Plugin author to add that to the code so check there for an update. Otherwise, your blog may bork if the Plugin isn’t activated.

So have you used this? Take it for a test drive and let me know what you think.

Related Articles

• A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and wordpress.com Users
• Categories versus Tags – What’s the Difference and Which One?
• The Problems With Tags and Tagging
• Categories versus Tags: Defining the Limitations
• The Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin
• Adding Technorati Tags to WordPressMU Sites
• Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags
• Tags Are Not Categories – Got It?
• What Do You Blog About? Check Your Tags
• Playing Tag With WordPress

---

Site Search Tags: utw, ultimate, tag, warrior, jeromes, jerome, keywords, wordpress, plugins, tags, meta, meta+tags
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen