Tagging is really the act of bookmarking a site with one of the services and a tag is actually nothing more than a keyword. Let’s say for example that you are into fishing and you find a really great site on fishing, you could “tag” that site with the tag of “fishing” as well as others and then share the page from your chosen bookmarking service with others. This is the way that tagging is used by the general public to share sites with each other.

So now you are probably wondering how you use this to promote your sites and actually make money with it. It’s really quite easy. Let’s say you have a site about golf and you write an article about the perfect golf swing. Well, you can tag the article with the tag, “perfect golf swing” and then link to the URL on your site where the article resides. It is that simple, the tag just needs to be relevant to the subject matter you are linking to. You can’t just use a tag for a high traffic term and then link it to something totally irrelevant, which is a sure way to get banned from the bookmarking services. It is easy enough to get traffic and use them to get indexed in the search engines without trying to game them.

Similar to keywords and search engines, the longer tail tags or longer phrases are easier to dominate than the more broad or general ones. One feature that Technorati has in particular is the ability to “claim” your blog for a particular tag. The cool thing about this is that a lot of people going to Technorati search for blogs about a particular subject so they will input the tag of the subject they are looking for and if your blog is listed for that tag it is displayed! On the Flickr site pictures can be bookmarked in the same way by tagging them a with a descriptive name that relates to the picture. You can start with the longer tail phrases and then continue adding more until you eventually have as many tags as possible that link to your site as well as the tags on your site itself. This takes us to another area of explanation which is the two main ways you can use tags for the purpose of business promotion.

When it comes to the use of social bookmarking and tagging for business promotion you can place tags on your on site which are then crawled and placed in the social bookmarking directories and you can also tag on your own “authority site network” that you have created on one or more of the services which is a method strongly espoused by Sean Wu of  Tag and Ping

In order to utilize the tagging method on your own site you will need to use a blogging platform such as Movable Type, Wordpress, or Blogger. I have to tell you from personal experience I can not recommend using Blogger for business due to their censorship. If you are going to use these methods in order to promote your websites as I am teaching you need your own domain, hosting and either Wordpress or Movable Type which you can install on your own server. Blogs have a built in functionality which allows you to alert the major blog directories of new posts when you make one. This is the process referred to as “pinging”. You can insert tags like we talked about within your posts which will result in an almost immediate indexing of the post by the social bookmarking service or blog directories.

tagging Tags social bookmarking