Short version of the review:

This plugin is a rock star. Install it pronto, if you dare. Level of difficulty: It’s the hardest install I’ve seen for a plugin.

Long version of the review:

The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WordPress helps you to more easily set Technorati-type tags on your posts. I have procrastinated installing it for a while simply because it really isn’t very hard to add Technorati tags manually. I can definitely see now that my decision to procrastinate was a dumb one, the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin is a lot more powerful than I knew.

Here’s a simple step-by-step of what you will find in this review/explanation:

• SEO Benefits
• SEO Negatives
• Time-Saving Benefits
• Time-Costing Negatives
• Knowledge Required (What you need to know to install the plugin.)
• Installing The Plugin (There are tons of different options. I show how I installed it.)
• Configuring The Plugin
• Using The Plugin When You Write A Post
• My Overall Thoughts On The Plugin

SEO Benefits

What I didn’t anticipate is that the plugin provides some huge SEO benefits. I thought that it simply made it easier to tag posts - it does a lot more than that. Here are some of the SEO benefits I can see:

• Your tags will no longer link to outside pages. (If you don’t know what tags are, you should read this first, ‘Get More Traffic - Technorati Tags‘. ) Usually when you tag your post entries, they are links that point to Technorati. This isn’t necessarily a catastrophe - in fact it’s better than not having tags - but simple math tells you that if you have 100 posts that have 5 tags each, that’s 500 outbound links. This will absolutely decrease PageRank on all of those pages, although not by a huge amount. The plugin allows you to create tag pages within your site, the tags point to the tag pages and are still coded to act as tags. In simple words it’s brilliant. Each tag you use will create a new page for your site.
• The tag pages are extra pages for your site. Adding more pages to your site gives Google and other search engines more pages to look at. The tag pages simply list the posts that were tagged with that tag. Have a look at my tag page for ‘blog‘. As you can see, the page lists all of the posts that were tagged ‘blog’. It also shows other tags that each post was tagged with.
• Increased inter-linking between pages. In order to have the best results in search engines, you need to have a well-defined link structure within your site. Search engines follow links within your site; it’s how they find all of your pages. For the maximum effect, you want search engines to be able to find your pages from more than one location. In other words you want to link to each page from multiple pages. As long as you tag each post you write, it will appear on all of the pages you tag the post with. This means that if you tag a post with 5 tags, there will be five extra pages linking to that post. This will make each page look more important to Google and the other search engines.
• The plugin suggests tags that are actually searched for. This is one aspect of the plugin that I didn’t anticipate at all. It actually creates a button on your write post page that you can use to get keyword suggestions from Yahoo. It looks through your text and compares what you’ve written with what is searched for in Yahoo. It then recommends the tags you can use, and you select the ones you want by clicking on them. You can also add additional ones by typing them into the tag box that the plugin also creates.

SEO Negatives

I thought about this long and hard, but I can’t think of a single reason from an SEO standpoint to not use the plugin.

Time-Saving Benefits

• You don’t have to create the code for each tag. Even if you use a tag generator it still takes time to copy the code and paste it in. With this plugin you just type in the ones you want, or click on the ones you want after a quick search.
• There is no need to research tags. The plugin does it for you. You don’t need to pull up the Overture keyword selector tool; you don’t need to look for possible tags at Technorati.

Time-Costing Negatives

• The plugin takes a while to install, in all honesty it was the hardest plugin I’ve ever installed. It’s also the most powerful plugin I’ve installed so it was worth it. It actually took me about 3 hours to install because the installation guide is huge and is pretty complicated due to the amount of options for the plugin. It also took me a while to get the tag pages to display how I wanted.

What You Need To Know To Install This Plugin

• FTP / Uploading - Here’s a lesson on how to upload using FTP if you need it.
• How To Work With The WordPress ‘Loop’
• How To Duplicate Files (I explain it but it would really help if you could already do it.)
• WordPress Template Tag Basics

If you don’t know how that stuff works, you are going to want to learn that first.

How I Installed The Plugin

Since there are tons of options to sort through, I have created a walk-through that will show you how I installed the plugin. If you follow this walk-through you will have it installed just like I have it; if you want to customize beyond that you’re on your own!

Disclaimer: This plugin is only for the brave! I wouldn’t go past this point if you don’t how to manipulate HTML. Back everything up beforehand. Honestly, if you don’t back-up your theme’s files, you will wish you did. I obviously can’t take responsibility for you messing your site up and I provide this walk-through as-is and without warranty. I repeat: I will take no responsibility whatsoever if your site gets messed up! That said, this obviously worked for me.

• Download the plugin. You’ll go to that page and look for a link that says ‘3.14159265 for Wordpress 2.0′. Any version of WordPress over 2.0 will be just fine. If you don’t have WordPress 2.0 you’re on your own because I do! There is another version there if you don’t have 2.0 but this walk-through probably won’t work since it will obviously be different.
• Extract the plugin. Find the file on your computer and right click your mouse on it. Select ‘Extract All’ or ‘Extract Here’ or whatever version of extract it says. Extract the file.
• Find the correct folder for upload. There are some extra files there, you need to double-click the ‘UTW3-14159265WP2′ folder, and then double-click the ‘plugins’ folder. You will then see the ‘UltimateTagWarrior’ folder, which is the one you will upload.
• Upload the folder to your wp-content/plugins directory. Yes, you have to upload the entire folder.
• Go into your WordPress Admin to activate the plugin. Once you’re in there, go to ‘Plugins’ and then find the one called ‘Ultimate Tag Warrior’. Click the activate link for the plugin.
• Add this code to your template theme (You have to add it into ‘the loop’ in your theme’s index.php file and probably in your single.php and home.php if your theme uses them.):

• You will need to click on the code (which is actually a picture), and a new window will pop up that you can copy the code from.
• Paste the code in right after the below code that makes the content for the pages; it looks like this: (Your theme might have a variation of this but it should still say ‘the_content’)

• Save the file(s) and upload if necessary. Using the code I gave you, your tags will end up looking like this (eventually):

If you want to change the look, you can of course alter the code, if you dare!

This Is Where It Gets Tricky!

• Create a new page for your theme, called tag.php. The easiest way to do this is to open up your index.php file with Notepad. You will then click ‘File’ and then select ‘Save As’ as type tag.php as the File name. Make sure to select All Files as the file type, otherwise it will add a .txt to the end, making it tag.php.txt. So, the tag.php is a duplicate of your themes index.php.
• Delete the entire loop, which is everything from the:

to the:

• Paste the following code in as the new loop (You can click on it to get to a page where you can copy it):

• Save the file and upload it to your theme folder.
• Now there is kind of a funny step, but you have to do it! You need to login to your WordPress admin and click ‘Write’ and then ‘Page’. For the title of the page, use Blog Tag Template. You don’t have to add any text to the page. You do have to find a section of the ‘Write Page’ that’s called ‘Page Template’. You will click the drop-down box under ‘Page Template’ and select the option called ‘Tag Archive */’. You will then publish the page. Don’t ask me what this does, but the plugin doesn’t work properly without it.
• We just added an extra page on your site wherever your pages are listed; you will want to exclude the extra page so that it’s not linked to in your template. You can find out which page number it is in your WordPress Admin, go ‘Manage’ and then ‘Pages’. Once you know which page number it is, you can exclude it by changing the WordPress wp_list_pages template tag in your WordPress theme. Since my pages are listed at the top of my site, my pages are listed in the header file. I opened up the header file and changed (102 is the number of the new page that I wanted to exclude):

to:

Update: Some of you might have a wp_list_pages function that already has a parameter in the functions. In other words, you might already have some code between the parenthesis. If you do, here is a solution for you, courtesy of Dylan:

If your template already has a parameter in the wp_list_pages() function, you need to set up the exclude as follows (example from the template I’m using).Before:
wp_list_pages(’title_li=’ . __(’Pages’) . ” );

After:
wp_list_pages(’exclude=8&title_li=’ . __(’Pages’) . ” );

Replace 8 with the actual post number. Hope this helps someone.

• In order to get the Tag pages to look like mine, you will have to paste these elements into your theme’s style sheet (style.css):

.utwtags2 ul{
font-size: 70%;
list-style: none;
color:grey;
margin: 5px 0 0 20px;
}

.utwtags li {
list-style: none;
color:grey;
text-decoration:none;
margin-left: 30px;
font-size:18px;
}

.utwtags ul {
list-style: none;
color:grey;
text-decoration:none;
margin-left: 30px;
}

You’re now done with the installation; now you need to configure it.

Configuring The Plugin

I’ll walk you through how I configured it. You can of course change the configuration at your discretion if you want to!

• Go to your WordPress admin panel, go to Options and then Tags.
• Select the box labeled: Use url rewriting for local tag urls (/tag/tag instead of index.php?tag=tag) This will make your URLs a little more search engine friendly
• Make sure that /tag/ is in the base URL box
• Select the check-box labeled; Include trailing slash on tag urls.
• Leave the rest of the options alone.
• Click Save.

If you want the plugin Author help docs, you can find them here.

Using The Plugin When You Write A Post

This part luckily is super easy! While writing a post, you will notice some new boxes directly below your ‘write post’ box:

The top box is where you can add in the tags if you want to type them in manually. You simply type them in - separating each tag with a comma.

You can also see the button that says, “Get Keyword Suggestions From Yahoo.” If you click it, the plugin will suggest tags that it finds in your text. This means that it won’t work if you haven’t written your text yet! The tool compares words in your text with words that are searched for in Yahoo, which is cool because it then recommends to you tags that are actually searched for.

One negative that I found while doing this is that if your posts are too long, this step doesn’t work. I resolved this by adding the tags after I had only written part of the post. This means that you will have to type some in manually if you have words to tag from the part of your post you write after you make the tags.

After you have clicked the button, you will see this:

The little blue links are the recommended tags, and all you have to do to add them to the list is click on them. Choose the ones you want, and you’re good to go. It’s that easy! You then publish the post as you normally would.

My Overall Thoughts On The Plugin

This is the most powerful plugin I’ve come across. It is, of course hard to install because with power you will always find complication. It was definitely worth the time it took me to install it.

I’m really excited to have added about 200 new tag pages to my site while reducing the amount of out-bound links by about 500. The plugin is highly customizable, I bet it took a bazillion hours to make.

I find myself wishing that I had installed it from day one. Today I went back through all of my posts and deleted my old Technorati tags, and replaced them with Tag Warrior ones.