The Appnel Group We didn't write the book on Movable Type -- just the manual

Increasing Traffic with Tags

In his post Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days Adrian W Kingsley-Hughes writes that he used Technorati tags to significantly increase traffic.

I found that by tagging my post effectively they were getting a lot more attention then their untagged counterparts, and as an added advantage I was getting focused, quality traffic to the site!

With the release of version 0.40 of our mt-tagslite plugin, this type of tagging in Movable Type is a breeze.

Once you've downloaded and installed the plugin, start by adding this code to your Individual Entries template:

<MTEntryTags><$MTTechnoratiTag$> </MTEntryTags>

Now start tagging your entries. When you go into the New/Edit Entry screen of any of your blogs you should find a Tags (formerly Keywords) fields. (If a Tags fields is not present open your display preference and make sure that field has been selected for display.)

If you want to tag all of your past entries in bulk enter into the Power editing mode found on the Entries Listing screen. mt-tagslite will have added a Tags field to each entry of the display.

When I rebuild this entry, some markup like this will be inserted into my page:

<a rel="tag" href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/tags">tags</a> 
<a rel="tag" href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/appnel">appnel</a> 
<a rel="tag" href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/movabletype">movabletype</a>

In this example our links are pointing to Technorati's tag search, however you have the option of pointing it other tag-enabled sites like del.icio.us and Flickr.

The mt-tagslite plugin is just a free subset of our more functional Tags.App plugin. This functionality was developed for the next version of that plugin and is already available in the form of a preview release.

One does not even have to point to an outside source for a tagspace. The only requirement is that the value of the tag be the final string in the href, so http://www.appnel.com/tips is a valid href, and Technorati will pick this up as referring to tips.

For now, I have my blog tags pointing inwardly as a means for people to find other posts with those tags. But I realize that may be a little egocentric, and people may actually want to find posts with those tags out in the world.

Agreed, Jack. To your point Tags.App users can point to the dynamic tags search/browse script that comes with the plugin. I was illustrating what you can do with tagslite. It does directly support other URLS, but perhaps it should.