How to Connect Multiple Different Words to a WordPress Term
Tags, Categories, and other taxonomies are the best way to organize WordPress content. With one click, you can create a Tag or Category that can be used across all the posts on your site.
If you have a large number of Tags and Categories, you may have noticed that some of the terms are duplicated. Here are some examples:
- You really just need one “orange” tag but have terms for “orange”, “oranges”, and “clementines”.
- You have terms for “Steve Burge”, “Steven Burge” and “Burge Steve”, even though they are the same person.
- You want a single “Concert” term that can connect content in different languages, such as “concerts”, “live band”, “musique en live”, “concerto”.
In this guide, we'll show you one approach to fixing those duplicate terms.
Solving Duplicate Terms with TaxoPress Synonyms
TaxoPress is a very popular plugin for managing WordPress terms. The Pro version of TaxoPress has a feature called “Synonyms“. This 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 n example of how that works. In the screenshot below, the main name for the term is “Apple”. The synonyms are “Apples”, “Golden Delicious”, “Granny Smith”, “Pink Lady”, “Honeycrisp”, “Red Delicious”, “Braeburn” and “Gravenstein”.
The synonyms are unique, so it's not possible to add a synonym to more than one term. If you attempt to add a synonym that already exists, you’ll see this message: “Duplicate synonyms found. apples is already added to another term.”
How Synonyms Work On Your Site
The Synonyms feature currently works with two key features of TaxoPress: Auto Terms and Auto Links.
With Auto Terms, TaxoPress will add the original term to the post if it finds a synonym in the content. So if you have “Apples”, “Golden Delicious” or “Granny Smith” 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 “Apples”, “Golden Delicious” and “Granny Smith” in your post content, all of those words will be linked to the archive page for “Apple”.
Do More With WordPress Terms
Between PublishPress and TaxoPress, you can really take advantage of the power available with WordPress terms. You can use TaxoPress to add Tags and Categories to any post types.
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.