Tags and Categories are a great way to organize WordPress content. With one click, you can create a Tag or Category that can connect all the stories on your site.
If you have a large number of authors, or have just been writing for a while, you may have noticed that some of the terms are duplicated. Here are some examples:
- You have terms for “Joe Biden”, “Biden” and “President Biden”, even though they are the same person.
- You really just need one “movies” tag but have terms for “movie” and also “movies”.
- You want a single “soccer” term that can connect content in different languages, such as “soccer”, “football”, “futbol”, “calcio”.
In this guide, I’ll show you one way to avoid those duplicate terms.
Solving Duplicate Terms with Synonyms
TaxoPress is a very commonly used plugin for managing your WordPress terms. One popular feature is to use TaxoPress to add Tags and Categories to any post types.
The Pro version of TaxoPress has a feature called “Synonyms” which allows you to have multiple words associated with a single term.
When TaxoPress scans your posts and finds a “Synonym”, it will act as if it has found the main term. Here’s an example of how that works. In the screenshot below, the main name for the term is “Movies”. The synonyms are “Movie”, “Film”, “Films”, “Cinema”, and “The Movies”.
The Synonyms feature connect with two key features of TaxoPress called Auto Terms and Auto Links.
We mentioned the Auto Terms feature before here on KinshiPress. With Auto Terms, TaxoPress will add the original term to the post if it finds a synonym in the content. So if you have “Movie”, “Film” or “Cinema” in your post content, TaxoPress will add the term “Apple” to your post.
With Auto Links, there is a setting to enable the use of synonyms. If you check the box in the screenshot below, TaxoPress will add links to any synonyms in your post. So if you have “Movie”, “Film” or “Cinema” in your post content, those words will be linked to the archive page for “Movies”.
Do More With WordPress Terms
If you run a busy publishing site with WordPress, you can really take advantage of the power available with WordPress terms.
TaxoPress is a great place to start managing your terms.
You can use the PublishPress Permissions plugin to stop WordPress users from creating new tags and to automatically create specific tags for some user roles.
The PublishPress Checklists plugin allows yo to choose a maximum or minimum number of tags for any post.
