Categories and tags are an extremely valuable addition to any website.
They are an excellent opportunity to include relevant keywords on pages
within your site. How else can you legally create that kind of
keyword rich internal hyperlink
magic? SEO benefits aside, your users gain simplified access to the
content that they want to see which promotes longer, deeper visits (
pageviews!).
Building the Database Structure
We
already have an Articles table in place. The only reference relevant
here will be the unique ID. We will have to add a list of the tags and
or categories and a table to link the two. I will list all the tags
into a table called Tags, and will create a table called ArticleTags to
link the two tables together.
Articles
|
ArticleTags
|
Tags
|
|
|
|
|
The Queries
- Get Tags For an Article
- SELECT t.Tag FROM Tags t
INNER JOIN ArticleTags at ON t.ID = at.TagID
WHERE at.ArticleID = @articleID
- Get Articles By Tag
- SELECT a.ID From Articles a
INNER JOIN ArticleTags at ON at.ArticleID = a.ID
WHERE at.TagID = @tagID
- Get Top Tags (for tag cloud or a simple tag list)
- SELECT
TOP 30 t.Tag FROM Tags t
INNER JOIN (SELECT COUNT(at.ID) as TagCount,
at.ID FROM ArticleTags at GROUP BY at.ID) as tt
ON tt.ID = t.ID ORDER
BY tt.TagCount DESC
- This creates a list of the top 30 tags
used. If you want to create a tag cloud from this result set you will
have to append another select into this data set in order to put it in
to alphabetical order. Changing the sort from tt.TagCoung to t.Tag
will not put the top 30 tags in to alphabetical order but return the
first 30 tags. You can also do this in your business layer using a
DataTable's DefaultView.Sort = "Tag ASC";
You
can use this to get started displaying the top tags around your site.
Simply replace tags with categories and you have a category system in
place as well. The benefits are plentiful reason enough to implement
these ideas both for you and your users. The next step is displaying
the Tag Cloud at the proper size which I will cover very shortly.
