Tag Em N Bag Em

Social Bookmark sites were unique in their introduction of the tagging system. A tag is nothing more than a label which can be applied to any bookmark, by anyone. You can apply several tags to a single page. Technorati, for example, allows up to 20.

A tag is just a category under which all sites with that tag are stored. For example Page A may be tagged with “apple, banana, grape, fruit” and Page B may be tagged “meat, vegetables, fruit, cereals”. As such they would both show up under the fruit category or page.

This simple rule has big implications as it is an excellent new method of storing and organizing information. For users of a SB site, it means they can browse a tag that interests them and see which links are listed under that tag. However, each link may have additional tags which the user may also be interested in. For example a search for “Dirt Bikes” may show a link which is also tagged with “Quad Racing” and the user continues on to read more under the “Quad Racing” tag. He may then follow another appropriate tag and find other relevant information. This simple but overwhelmingly useful organizing system has now become widespread and is now used in most commercial Blogging systems to organize posts. It was adopted by WordPress several versions in and Blogger.com eventually caved in and used it as standard. Tagging systems can be seen in use on commercial sites like the BBC, Flickr, and some e-mail systems. Tagging systems are also useful in academic settings, especially universities, colleges and libraries where the evolution of progressive tagging organizes information in a continuous way.

Tags are extremely useful to SEO. In our example above a fruit tag was either already in existence or it was created when we added the tag. This fruit tag has its own physical page, which would be something like www.socialbookmarksite.com/tags/fruit. This page is picked up by Google as a page all about various fruits and because it has fresh and unique content being added on a regular basis, it begins to rank fairly well over a period of time. If and when your new article shows up in here, you get yet another free and valuable incoming link which is targeted towards fruit and Google sees that your page is about fruit and nudges you up another few ranks and Google begins to get a picture of what your website is about.

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