Kirsty’s Affiliate Quick Tips – WordPress Plugin To Allow HTML in Category Descriptions
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One of my readers brought this plugin to my attention recently (thanks Chris). Basically, there is a plugin that will override the function in WordPress that’ll strip out all but the most basic tags from your category descriptions. Allow HTML in Category Descriptions means you can add a nice content unit or similar and take advantage of and monetise any traffic your blog categories may be getting.
This Plugin Hasn’t Been Tested by Me!
Usually I’ll thoroughly test anything before I mention it on the blog, but I’m very short on time at the moment and it’ll likely take me several weeks to have a play with it. I think this plugin could be a juicy one so I didn’t want to make y’all wait to hear about it.
But I Think I Can Put It To Very Good Use If It Works Well…
As you all might know, I add descriptions to my WordPress categories to get a chance at some additional search terms. I also use the Thumbnails for Excerpts plugin to display nice product images at a category level so visitors hitting those pages have something to browse through.
It’s A Good Idea, But It Looks A Bit Pants!
You can see an example of this on my mens underwear site, here. It’s not the smoothest looking solution in the world, but as I was putting out so many posts at the individual product or collection level for this site I thought it’d be a shame not to take the time to write a few hundred words and jam them into the category descriptions to try and get some extra traffic in. This has been very successful on Blokes Undies and I now rank very well for most terms around my categories.
The only issue is that the categories have a relatively high bounce rate. Previously I’ve always just figured it’s worth having the traffic going to those sections till I work out a solution. If this plugin does what it says on the tin I think I might have found it! I think it will create a very nice, integrated looking blog structure that’s very efficient with no page going to waste for either SEO purposes or traffic channelling.
I’ll probably try it out in the next few weeks. I’ll let you guys take a look when I’m done (I should really tidy those category images as well – I’m sure we can have them looking better than that!).
If you try this plugin please let me know how you get on 
July 14th, 2010 at 9:11 am
I have managed to add a working hyperlink to the category description without using a plugin, simply by using apostrophes rather than speech marks in the HTML code. Not sure if this would work for other HTML code but perhaps worth a try before installing yet another plugin
July 15th, 2010 at 5:34 am
Good tip David, thanks for adding it to the post. Definately one of the things I don’t like about WordPress are the sometimes unintended consequences of two plugins “disagreeing” with each other!!
July 16th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
You can add hyperlinks to category descriptions anyhow (without changing ” to ‘ and without any plug in) if I remember rightly. Unfortunately wordpress seems to strip out any other html, images etc., even if you use apostrophe’s which is a shame because I’m all for keeping the plug in count down!
Kirsty, I just checked your undies site out and noticed the category descriptions are showing as titles on your links. Just thought you may want to know
July 17th, 2010 at 2:01 am
Oh bloody hell not again!! I always forget to go and change it every time WordPress updates… ultimately results in me having to go back and read my own post on the subject so I can remind myself how to remove it.
Thanks for the heads up Chris. Gahhhh…..