Simple tags is one of the best WordPress plugins for controlling your tags. In fact, I consider this plugin to be my “go to” when looking for a good tags plugin. There is no need to pay for a premium plugin because this one is 100% free. It’s a pretty basic WordPress plugin that does have a lot of uses. Simply put, it helps in showing your visitors tag links. These do help your SEO and the usability of your website. The plugin comes with loads of features, and they’re very easy to setup. In the WordPress dashboard, you will have six main different categories of settings. I am going to go to the different settings that you configure on the backend.
With the “Features” settings, you can do all kinds of configurations. The first option that you get is “auto links tags.” It’s a very powerful feature to have on your WordPress site. It works in a simple way. For example, if you have a tag like https://yourdomain.com/tag/marketing, in any of the posts if you have written “marketing,” then it will link to the “marketing” tag automatically.
The second option that you have is “mass edit terms” which is pretty useful. It will allow you to edit multiple tags from multiple posts at once. According to the plugin author Amaury Balmer, you can edit tags for more than 50 posts at once.
The “Clicks Tag” Feature is a handy feature. It will allow you to display all the tags of your database. “Autocompletion” with old input is another handy feature. It helps in entering tags more easily for each of your posts. Another handy feature is “Advanced Manage Terms.” It allows you to edit, merge, delete and also add terms for any taxonomy.
I’m always a fan of WordPress plugins that use shortcodes. Thankfully Simple Tags does allow you to use shortcodes. The two other useful features are tags for page and tag cloud shortcode. By default, WordPress doesn’t have the tag feature for pages. However, Simple Tags provides you with that feature. Having tags for pages can be very handy. If you use the Auto links tags, your pages will also get the links if you use the same keyword. With the tag cloud shortcode, you will get a shortcode. Wherever you insert that shortcode, the tag cloud will be displayed.
The tag cloud settings control how you want to display your tags. The main two settings for “Tag Cloud” are “Order Tags Section” and “Order Tags Display.” Here you have a lot of options – counter, random, name, ascending and descending. Just display them the way you want for your WordPress site.
For example, if you want to display 100 of the most popular tags in a random order, you will need to select “count” for “order by for tags selection” and “desc” for “order tags section’.” Keep in mind “order tags section” is only for tag collection.
You also have “order by for tags display” and “order tags display.” These settings are used for reordering them before your display. The more you experiment with these settings, the better you can configure them.
You also have the tag link format that you can define. By default, a link will already be there. If you want to change it, you can do so. You can also count the number of tags that you want to display. By default, the number of tags will be set to 45. You can also specify the text when there’s no tag to display.
Some of the additional options for tags are color and font size. You can also select the largest and smallest font-size. Obviously, you’re not limited to what you can do with Simple Tags.
In Tags for Current Post, you will have a lot of options. You have the option of adding a tags list into your RSS feed. It can be helpful because your readers will know the kind of content that you create on your site.
You can also display tags list in your post. There are a few settings for that – all, blog only, home only, singular only, single only and page only. Some additional options that you have post tag separator string, text to display before tags, text to display after tags list and also max tags to display. Set it to zero to show all tags.
I have kept the administration part until the last part of the Simple Tags article because most webmasters probably won’t use it. Here you have options of integrating different APIs.
Some of the APIs that you can use are of OpenCalais, Alchemy, Tag4Site, Zemanta, etc. Most of them are of artificial intelligence types and natural language processing. They learn and track visitor activities. All the processing and data collected are used with the Simple Tags plugin for displaying it to the visitors.
The meta keywords option was previously available with Simple Tags. However, meta keywords don’t have any contribution towards search engine rankings. It used to back in 2000; however, it’s now 2016, and I completely disregard meta tags now.
You can download this plugin at: https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-tags/. That’s about everything on the Simple Tags WordPress Plugin. I should note that the author stated right on his plugin page that he does not answer the question in the support section on WordPress.org. He wants you to make a note at https://github.com/herewithme/simple-tags under the “issues” section. Did I miss anything that you want me to clarify in this article? Have you used Simple Tags on your WordPress sites? I would love to hear your feedback on it; please leave your comments down below.
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