For those of you who are hard core bloggers, you’ve probably heard about tags and tagging before. Chances are you’ve even used tags to help drive traffic to your blogs. But many haven’t.
But what exactly are tags?
Tags are basically keywords. A tag can be a category or a subject. When we talk about tagging, all we are basically referring to is how you summarize what your webpage or site is about.
Is it about marketing? If so, then you might want to use the tag, “marketing”.
So the concept of tagging is not really that much different from your standard keywords. But there’s an interesting difference between using tags and using keywords in the hopes of getting some traffic to your site.
As an internet marketer optimizing a site for the search engines, you’re generally taught to select a keyword (or keyphrase) and stick with that keyword throughout a single page. A single page on your site becomes the official “marketing” page or whatever keyword you chose.
You can most certainly create a page that revolves around internet marketing and web advertising, but the search engines will get confused when it comes to categorizing your site. The fact that you’re trying to rank well for both keyphrases will dilute them both out. In the end, you won’t rank real high for either term.
So with search engine optimization, a single page equals one keyword (or keyphrase) to get the optimum effect.
When you want to rank well for another related term, you know you need to create an entirely separate page.
But with tagging, you can select several keywords (or tags) for each page of your site and not be penalized. In fact, you actually get rewarded for selecting a number of related tags rather than just one. With tagging optimization, a single page equals a chance to rank high for many tags.
As you can imagine, this can really help you maximize your efforts. If every page can rank well for a dozen terms, it’s as though you just wrote a dozen pages instead of one.
Many sites have sprung up all over the internet that organize information by tags. So everyone who wants the extra traffic these sites can provide them is tagging their content.
Some of these sites are bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us and Furl. Others, like Technorati, have even more features, combining content from bookmarking sites with blog posts (and this site is where the catch phrase, ‘tag and ping’ applies).
No matter how you look at it, tagging provides you with another means for getting your site and pages actually found by qualified buyers without having to spend your hard earned money on advertising.
Obviously, the search engines don’t rank based on tags (they have their million dollar algorithms), but many other sites do. Many of the Social Bookmarking sites use tags to help organize their content. And many of these sites are highly trafficked.
Social bookmarking sites are cropping up all over the internet. The basics of Social bookmarking revolve around allowing users the option to store their favorite sites and webpages online and label them with tags.
Since the bookmarks are stored online, they are not limited to a particular computer. Most Social bookmarking sites also have built in RSS features so users can share their bookmarks. Some even let users vote for the bookmark or article and will put the most favored links up higher. As a web owner, this means you will receive some extra exposure if your pages are favored by Social
bookmarkers. Each Social bookmarking site is run differently, but all are organized by the concept of tags.
The system of tagging is not perfect. Since people may choose their own tags you will come across a number of grammatical errors and other strange tags. You may get misspellings, both the singular and plural forms of the word, and even spaced and un-spaced versions of the word.
But, since your webpage may be tagged with many tags instead of just one, who really cares? With tagging, you will want your content to be tagged with as many related tags as possible to increase the chances of your webpage being found.
Even better yet, you don’t actually have to use the word in your page in order to use it as a tag. This is a major shortcoming of the search engines. Even plural, non-plural forms of the word aren’t interchangeable in the realm of the search engines. The keyword (or phrase) you use in your page is the exact keyword (or phrase) that will rank high.
But with tagging, you have choices. Your articles can be tagged with many different related keywords and you’re not going to be penalized.
But there are other reasons to start tagging, too.
Many searchers actually prefer to use these social bookmarking sites to find content online due to the fact that they are organized for people, by people. Each bookmarked site is more of a referral than just a site with the right number of keywords to rank it high in the search engines.
One of the top tagging sites on the internet, Technorati, allows the web owner to tag their own content and add it to the Technorati index. Bloggers have been rewarded with thousands of extra visitors per day by mastering Technorati.
There’s no doubt about it, add tagging to your traffic building arsenal and you will definitely see some results. And you can use this traffic to increase your sales, generate adsense revenue or earn affiliate commissions.
It doesn’t matter.
As you already know, on the web, it’s all about traffic. Once you get some traffic flowing to your site, you just need to monetize it with a converting sales letter, adsense clicks, whatever.
If you add tagging to your traffic generation arsenal, you will generate more traffic. It’s that simple. Combine it with other methods and you’ll soon have a steady stream of traffic coming to your site from all angles. And that truly is the best way to build a solid business.
