The Ultimate Tag Warrior is simply a rock star of a plugin. The benefits of using it are endless. Here are a few of the reasons I use it:

• Tag pages are created for you, extending the amount of pages in your site.
• It increases PageRank. Since you are no longer linking out to Technorati or another site to make tags, that ‘link juice’ stays within your site. It’s passed from your post pages to the tag pages, which of course pass it to your home page.
• Even though the tags don’t link to Technorati, they still work to categorize your posts in Technorati and other blog search engines.

I’ve already created a guide/review that can help you to install the plugin, so if you missed it you can find it here: Ultimate Tag Warrior Wordpress Plugin Reviewed.

One Known Problem With Ultimate Tag Warrior

The only thing that has been bothering me about the Ultimate Tag Warrior is that the tag pages don’t show many posts that are tagged with the perspective tag. The plugin actually takes the amount of posts you show on your homepage and uses that number to determine how many posts it will show on each tag page. Since my home page shows 5 posts, my tag pages would only show 5 posts.

This results in very small tag pages, even the pages for tags that are used many times. I could show more posts on my home page, but I show want to and I really don’t like to do things I don’t want to do. I’ve used the tag ‘make money online’ about 25 times, but the make money online tag page was only showing 5 of the posts I had used that tag on.

The first problem with that is that the pages are less likely to get indexed when they don’t have very much material on them. The second problem is that having only five posts per tag page lowers the inner-linking potential of the tag pages. I wanted my tag pages to show at least 20 of the posts that were tagged with the perspective tags.

The Hack That Fixes The Tag Page Issue

Liz Jackson (who by the way is a freaking genius for creating this hack) helped me to fix this issue, and the solution is actually quite simple if you’re not the person that has to figure it out. Here’s the step-by-step:

1. Hard-code your home page to show the amount of posts you would like to show. This will make it so you can change the number of posts you want to show on the tag pages without changing the amount you show on the home page. To do this you actually have to edit your WordPress theme, and I will show you how to do it! Here are the steps:

• Login to your WordPress admin.
• Click ‘Presesntation’.
• Click ‘Theme Editor’. The screen will then load all of the files in your theme, and you will see them listed on the right-hand side of your screen.
• Click ‘home.php’. This will make it so your admin will load the home.php file, which is the template for your homepage. If you don’t have a ‘home.php’ file you will click the ‘index.php’ file instead.
• Look for this piece of code:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?><?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

• Delete the code and replace it with this piece:

<?php $custom_loopcount = 0; ?> <?php if (have_posts()) : while ((have_posts()) && ($custom_loopcount < 5)) : the_post(); ?> <?php if (is_home()) $custom_loopcount++; ?>

• Change the number 5 to the amount of posts you would like to show on the homepage. You will leave it as a 5 of you want to show 5.
• Click ‘Update File’ to save your changes.

2. Trick Ultimate Tag Warrior to show more posts on your tag pages than are shown on your home page. Doing this is actually fairly easy and can be done by using an easy to install plugin. Here’s the step-by-step:

• Download the Custom Query String plugin. This plugin is actually very cool and allows you to choose how many posts you want to show on each type of page. By using it, you could show 10 posts on your home page, 5 on your category pages, 8 on your archive pages, or any combination of post counts you wish.
• Upload the plugin to your wp-content/plugins folder. If you aren’t sure how to upload using FTP, see this lesson: How To FTP Using FileZilla.
• Activate the plugin by logging into your WordPress admin, going to ‘Plugins’, finding the ‘Custom Query String Plugin’ on the list, and clicking the activate link next to it.
• Go to the options for the plugin by clicking ‘Options’ in your WordPress admin and then clicking ‘CQS’.
• Select ‘is_home’ in the ‘Condition’ drop-down. Type in the number of posts you would like to show on your tag pages in the ‘Show’ column. I wanted to show 20, so I typed in 20.
• Click ‘Add’.

My options ended up looking like this, before I clicked ‘Add’:

Once you click add, you should be good to go! It might seem like you’re changing the amount of posts that appear on your home page. Don’t worry, the theme hack we used in step 1 overrides this setting. Your home page will stay on the number you entered in step 1, and your tag pages will use the number you entered in the options in step 2!

Conclusion

This hack will make it so that you can get more traffic on your tag pages. It will also help you to increase the inner-linking in your site which makes your site more search engine friendly and will pass more PageRank to your homepage. If you use Ultimate Tag Warrior, this hack will help you significantly.