In the first part of this series, we explained the importance and advantages of using Tags in WordPress posts.  We then followed up with how to track down and correct tagless posts on your blog.  In this last installment, we’ll take a look at a plugin designed to help high volume publishers or those having limited time to automate or semi-automate the tagging process.

I need to start out by saying that no automated tool is going to be able to match the abilities of a good editor or content architect. There are tools, however, that will help streamline the process and take a large amount of that potentially heavy load off your back.

My go to solution for this scenario is the Strictly Auto Tags plugin.  In the author’s description, the plugin,

“…scans an English language post for words that could be used as tags and then orders them so that the most relevant words get added against the post. Just because a word appears in a post that is already in your list of tags does not mean that it should automatically be added against the article. Therefore the plugin orders all matching tags in descending order and picks only those that occur the most.

As well as using existing tags to work out which words to tag posts with this plugin automatically detects new words to use as tags by using a simple rule of thumb I have discovered during my time using WordPress as a blogging tool. I have found that over 90% of all tags I use fall into one of the following three categories: Acronyms e.g CIA, FBI, AIG, IT, SQL, ASP, names of people or places and countries. Therefore using the power of regular expressions I scan posts for words or sentences that match these three groups and then store them as potential tag candidates.”

Other features include:

• Re-Tag All Posts (scan and tag)
• Clean up under-utilized tags in database
• Auto Discover of recommended tags on new posts
• Rank Title (weight towards post title)
• Rank HTML (weight towards H tags in HTML, etc)
• Max Tags
• Max Tag Words
• Noise Words (filter out common words in grammar)

Name: Strictly Auto Tags

Author: Strictly Software

Discussion: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/strictly-autotags/

Need help implementing this plugin in your WordPress site?  Contact us for our professional services.  We can also provide support & expertise in convenient “blocks” to suit your short and long term needs.