When tags were introduced to WordPress, most people expected the tag names to be in lowercase. They weren't, or to be more exact, they weren't forced into lowercase. They use the same format as the category names. It's your choice. There's a problem with this, however, as I'll quickly explain.

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I'm writing this in the hope that one or more aggressive WordPress plugin developers will see it and turn my dreams into reality. I have written about optimizing AdSense in the past, but I don't want to go back into those articles to point out relative information.

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In part one of "The UV SEO Series", I introduced the series. In part two, I wrote about having one website address. In part three, I wrote about internal linking strategies. In part four, I emphasized meta descriptions and meta tags. Today, I'm going to give you some ideas about keywords, keyword density and keyword placement.

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In part one of "The UV SEO Series", I introduced the series. In part two, I wrote about having one website address. In part three, I wrote about internal linking strategies. Today, I'm going to emphasize meta descriptions and meta tags.

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If you use any type of analytics service or application, such as Google Analytics, Clicky or Mint, you can see what's being searched for on your own website. How do you know what people are searching for when they're not hitting your website? What if you could tap into one or more resources to increase your search hits? Google offers two resources, one requiring nothing but your eyes and the other requiring you to have a free account.

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Those of you who know me, know I wouldn't recommend a WordPress plugin that isn't worth using. HeadSpace is not only worth using, it's worth using immediately.

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Okay, I finally knuckled under and decided to add tags to my theme. Prior to WordPress version 2.3, you had to use a plugin in order for your theme to support tagging. Now, however, it's a native function and it's pretty easy to use. If you look down at the bottom of this post, you'll see "Categories:" followed by "Tags:". It's going to take some time to go through a thousand other posts to add tags.

You may wonder why I'd even bother to start using tags this late in the game. It's the related articles thing. I was maintaining a separate database to keep track of related articles, using keywords. Kind of like tagging (duh). Once I thought about it, I decided to stop circumventing the plugin that shows related posts and just add tagging. It'll be a whole lot easier.

I already had both an archive.php and a category.php file for my theme (that I previously copied from index.php and modified). I just added a tag.php file to the list. As soon as I make a couple of minor changes, I'll be all set.

Just in case you want to play with tags, and the theme you're using doesn't support them, take a look at this WordPress Codex page to make sure you're doing it right: Template Tags/the_tags

I have experimented with several social networking sites over the past few months and I've come to the conclusion that StumbleUpon is the best service to drive traffic to your blog.

This doesn't mean you should ignore the rest, but it does mean that you should make using StumbleUpon a priority. Here are some tips to using it:

• Always ask someone else to stumble a particular article and write a review of the post. Some stumblers will flag it as spam if you "thumbs up" your own post and write your own review first. They'll even go so far as to notify their friends to do the same, including a "thumbs down".
• The StumbleUpon toolbar has a feature called "Send to". I just recently figured out what it was for (silly me). Make sure you have the actual article showing in your browser and then send the page to one of your StumbleUpon friends for a thumbs up/review. In fact, I'll soon be removing the "Comment for a Stumble" link from my sidebar (along with the others in that box) because this is much quicker and just as effective (unless someone tells me otherwise).
• You want to stumble the pages your friends have stumbled as much as possible. This drives traffic to those stumbled pages. If you run out of pages, pick another category. Friends should make sure they "thumbs up" their own pages (not as the first one) so those pages are included in your friends' "queue".
• Never give a thumbs up or a review to a sponsored post. It will end up getting flagged as spam and this has a negative effect on your traffic. Miracles do happen and some sponsored posts will make it through. But why take the chance?
• When doing a review in conjunction with a stumble, add as many relevant tags as possible. This will put it in the queues for stumblers that have set it for those categories.

Are any of the tips unclear? I'll happily fix them if they are. These can't possibly be the only tips for good stumbling and good traffic results, so feel free to chime in with your own. I'll add them to the post if they're not duplicates.