How Tagging and Keywords Stack Up

Fed up with being shoveled content by search engine algorithms, a segment of searchers have switched to tagging and social bookmarking to find online information. Can you capitalize off this new wave of search?

What is tagging?

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 dogs?

If so, then you might want to use the tag, “dogs”.

What else is your site (or blog) about?

Perhaps German Shepherds, Golden Retrievers, dog training, and puppy toys.

Well, then all these would make great tags as well.

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 “dog training” page or whatever keyword you chose.

You can most certainly create a page that revolves around dog training and puppy toys, 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.

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.

What is Social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking sites are cropping up all over the internet. Del.icio.us and Furl are two of the most popular Social bookmarking sites to date. But sites like these run rampant on the internet and are set to explode in popularity.

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. 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 quite differently, but all are organized by the concept of tags.

I should point out that 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 unspaced versions of the word. For example, if you have a site about dog training, your tag might be “dog training” or dogtraining”.

However, since your webpage may be tagged with many tags instead of just one, none of this will matter much to you. With tagging, you will want to be tagged with as many related tags as possible to increase the chances of your webpage being found.

Many searchers 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.