A few days ago on my Wordpress Plugins site, I updated to Wordpress 2.04 (from 1.5.2) and switched to using UTW for tagging rather than Taggerati.
Taggerati and UTW have slightly different functionality. 2.04 is supported by both, but Taggerati isn’t really being updated. I am going to miss a couple of the inline tags I could use when posting using a desktop application, but longterm support I hope is more likely with UTW.
I now have a partial implementation on the site, but I don’t have all the pages tagged. I also don’t have what was a key feature of the previous setup, a large tag cloud at the top of the page.
Total page views currently are down 75%, based on data over 5 days. There is a huge difference between 2000 page views and 400 over a 5 day period.
Once I have retagged all the posts, I will see how page views are affected (that will just be tags showing at the bottom of a page)
Then I will re-introduce a tag cloud right at the top of the page. I believe I will get a lot more page views, maybe back to previous numbers.
I will report back with updates to this post.
4 Comments
It’s amazing how important tagging can be on a blog, since I started tagging my posts I have been getting a lot more visitors.
Cheers
Martin
There are 2 sides to tagging, and you are benefiting from one side of it, which is that the tags are picked up and used by the various folksonomy search engines.
Human visitors search for certain tags, and come visiting, and people generating automated sites also pickup content based on certain tags.
My post was mainy in regards to the second benefit, onsite navigation.
On my Wordpress Plugins site I previously had a large tag cloud presented to visitors, and this attracted a lot of clicks, even when the site only had 5 pages ;)
If your aim is to get a lot of page views, and allow readers to dig deeper for relevant content, then a prominent tag cloud above the fold might be a good answer.
I haven’t tested it yet, but there is at least one PPC service that presents text link adverts as a cloud. For many sites, that could be a good way to generate revenue, because although the payout per click is low, the perception of the viewer that it is a tag cloud not an advert encourages clicks.
Obviously that works best for sites that have lots of first time visitors. Repeat visitors will have “cloud blindness”.
Taggerati + UTW = cool tag site
Theoretically you could use them both at the same time, if you modified UTW to use instead of [tag]
UTW does lack some of the Taggerati features, but many can easily be duplicated or “borrowed”.
There has been talk recently on the WP-Hackers mailing list of including some kind of tagging functionality within the core of Wordpress, or as suggested, just to have a common database that all tag plugins use to represent the data in different ways. UTW seems to have the most active support and highest user base, thus seems the safer bet for standardization. WP 2.05 is just around the corner, WP 2.1 is at least visible on the not too distant horizon, and it is best to go with an option that has long term support.