Vantage Smart Tags Plugin

Description

Make smarter use of the tags in Vantage with the Vantage Smart Tags plugin. The plugin will let you convert all multiple choice fields like drop-down, checkbox and radio buttons as well as location components (like country, state, city)  into listing or event tags, so you only have relevant tags that either you have created in the form of field values, or they are location names that are supplied by the Google Geocoder API. Also turning the right kind of fields into tags will give your site a big SEO advantage!

Disadvantages of a “Tags Input” Text-box Field

When you have a free text input available that generates tags in your website, chances are that they are going to go out of hand one day. There is no limit to how many tags can a poster add, also they generally put long phrases, or do not use commas at all to separate tags, and nowadays people even put hashtags(!), other common occurrences are misspellings, wrong suffixing (for example teacher/teaching) and synonyms (two words that mean the same thing). The result: within a short frame of time you could have hundreds of tags that will be used in at the most one ad, and even that number will become zero once the ad expires! Here are some of the realistic examples of tags people usually input:

• tution in daytime, tutor required immediately (using long phrases few else will use, tution and daytime could have been separate tags)
• teacher bangkok (same as above, but apparently they were meant to be separate tags, but the comma (,) was forgotten)
• teacher and teaching as two different tags
• #tutor #math (hashtags, thanks to Twitter, and no comma again)

What is the solution?

The solution to this problem is simple. Use Vantage Smart Tags instead to convert the multiple choice fields (i.e. drop-down, checkbox, radio)  into tags for your listings and events. For example, if you have a tutor directory website, in which you have a drop-down or a radio field called “Preferred Time” with options “Morning” and “Evening”, you can convert it to ad tag using the plugin, and all the new listing will either be tagged “Morning” or “Evening”. Now the students looking for morning tuitions can click on the tag called “Morning” and see all the tutors available in the morning. In the same way, if there is a checkbox field with all the subjects as options, a listing can be tagged in multiple subjects when the tutor posts it, and the result is each subject has its own tag page listing only the tutors that teach that particular subject. Simple, isn’t it?

Location Names as Tags?

That’s right! Didn’t you always want your users to find all listings or events within a location on the same page? Vantage Smart Tags will allow you to convert up to six location components (like country, state, districts, city, etc) into tags, that Google will reverse geocode from the location entered by listing owners. You can even test the locations in the settings page by entering sample addresses and checking what Google returns against each component to help you select the most relevant ones.

Advantages of Using Vantage Smart Tags

• SEO friendly – each tag page will have relevant listings or events, hence you can proudly display your tags in widgets, menus, etc!
• Location pages – you can add countries / states / cities to your menus and your users can find geocoded listings or events on the same page. Test location results before deciding what you want as a tag.
• Limited number of tags – The maximum number of tags is the sum total of all the value in the fields you convert to tags plus the number of Google recognised locations that you have selected to be converted.
• No misspellings, hashtags or unnecessary mistakes – Since all the tags come from options that you have created or Google has supplied, no need to remove spammy tags every few days.

1.0.1 (05/07/2017)

- MAJOR UPDATE: Made compatible with Vantage 4.x

1.0.0 (08/06/2015)

- Initial release version (at the time of Vantage 3.0.1)