The history of the Internet has been categorized by exponential change.
The growth of the Web has been one of the fastest developments in our
history. The companies who lacked adaptation have fizzled into the virtual
dust. However, those who are adapting their business to the many new online
developments are continuing to thrive.
One of the most recent changes online has been termed Web 2.0. One of
the biggest elements to define Web 2.0 is social bookmarking: a system
that allows Internet users to bookmark a site without storing it on their
local computer. Thousands of people are embracing this new way of finding
information. Unlike the big, impersonal search engines that currently dominate the search
engine market, social bookmarking sites provide a friendly, interactive
community.
Yahoo, for one, expects social bookmarking to be a long-term trend. They
just recently launched an interactive community called My Web 2.0. Ebay
is expanding their own community with the recent launch of the world's
largest commercial wiki. Digg and Furl have based their entire business
around the concept of social bookmarking.
So, what is this new technology that seems to be increasing every day?
Social bookmarking is the process of using a web service to keep track
of your personal bookmarks. This bookmark is "tagged" with keywords
that the user decides are relevant to the content of the bookmark. Once
tagged, it becomes publicly available for others to tag and explore.
The combined effect of the social bookmarking user base is extremely effective.
Any time that you are looking for relevant information on a particular
topic, you can go to any social bookmarking site and do a search using
tags (keywords) to find relevant, human reviewed content.
In fact, tagging results are even showing up in the search engines. If
you spend much time at all in the major search engines, you have most
likely seen some search results from Technorati.
At the time of this writing, Technorati was the number one result on the
MSN search engine for the keyword phrase "tag and ping".
There are a number of ways that you can benefit from this explosive trend
taking place online. Online marketers are currently using a technique
called "tag and ping" to reap a multitude of benefits from the
social bookmarking sites. Unfortunately, much like spam within the search engines, a number of people
are abusing this technique.
However, you can still benefit if you know the correct techniques. Just
like the search engines, although there are people who abuse the system,
there are still huge rewards for those who play the game correctly.
Social Bookmarking Can be Used to:
Obtain one-way backlinks.
Announce new pages on your web site and...
Gain free web traffic.
Time to Do Some Research
Before you begin submitting your sites to the social bookmarking sites,
there is some preliminary work that needs to be done. You must first take
some time to research popular tags within your target market. Just like
optimizing for the regular search engines, the keywords you choose to
tag can make a dramatic difference in the amount of traffic you receive.
Technorati is one of the best places to do tag (keyword) research to determine
what tags you should use with your own content.
To see what tags are popular for your keyword, go to Technorati.com, click
on the Tags button and then do a search for your keyword (tag). Technorati
will then give you a list of related tags that you could use to categorize
your web page under.
You can do some additional research at ClipMarks http://www.clipmarks.com,
which allows you to search the most popular tags in addition to related
tags. Simply type your keyword into the search box and you will be given
a list of related terms that are being searched for.
The third place that I like to tag research is at Yahoo's My Web 2.0.
http://myweb.yahoo.com/.
On the bottom-left hand side of the page you will see a list of the most
popular tags. At the bottom of this list you can click on "view more"
to see an expanded list.
I like to sort the list by popularity. Once you have done this you can
search through hundreds of the top keyword tags.
Setting up Tag and Ping
Once you have completed your keyword research, it is time to start
tagging and pinging. You can set up your blog to tag and ping your blog
posts automatically.
Wordpress is the best tool for tagging and pinging. Below I will give
an overview on how to use tag and ping within Wordpress.
Create your blog post.
Add relevant "tags" at the end of your blog post.
Publish your blog post.
Ping social bookmarking sites.
Because many of the social bookmarking sites are heavily spidered,
your pages can be quickly spidered simply by being present in the index.
Once you have finished the four previous steps, the social bookmarking
sites will then crawl your blog post and index it under the tags you
have specified.
Now that you have a general overview, let's go into the process in-depth.
Tags are simply links that are formatted in a way that allows social bookmarking
spiders to recognize them as tags. Whenever the social bookmarking spiders
see these tags, they immediately start munching the content to index it
on their site.
" [tagname] The [tagname] can be anything, but it
should be descriptive. Please only use tags that are relevant to the post.
You do not need to include the brackets, just the descriptive keyword
for your post. Just make sure to include rel="tag".
The example above links to Technorati but you can link to any web page
that ends in a tag. In fact, if your blog supports categories, you can
even link to your own blog.
The social bookmarking sites will pick up and index your blog post even
if you don't link back to them. The key is simply knowing how to set this
up. To do this, you will need to create tags for your blog.
Quick Note : Any tag that is two words or longer should have a
"+" symbol in between the words. Never include spaces when creating
tags.
In order for this example to work, you must create blog categories for
each tag. So, for this example, you would need to set up a category for
social bookmarking, tag and ping, and web 2.0.
For each of the categories that you have setup within your blog, you can
automatically create a tag for them whenever you create your post simply
by assigning that particular post to that category.
Once you have submitted your post, you will see a number of categories
at the bottom of the post to indicate which categories your entry has
been posted to. These are your "tags" and they will be indexed
by any social bookmarking site that you add to your ping list.
Setting up Your Ping List
On that note, let's expound on the idea of the ping list. To set up
your ping list within Wordpress, go to "Options" and then click
"Writing". When you scroll to the bottom, you will see a box
that will allow you to add your very own ping list. Within this list,
you will want to add all of the social bookmarking sites that accept and
crawl blog posts. For a complete list, go to:
There is no sense in creating all of your tag URLs by hand. If you are
using Wordpress, you can set your blog up to do this automatically. You
can do this using SimpleTags http://www.broobles.com/scripts/simpletags/.
SimpleTags is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily generate Technorati
tags at the bottom of your blog entries.
To be truly successful in the social bookmarking community, you must be
an active participant, not just a leecher. Be sure and bookmark other
sites as well wherever you decide to employ a tag and ping strategy.
Predictions for the Future
Some people believe that tag and ping will lose its effectiveness
because of people that abuse the system. However, I believe otherwise.
While people who abuse the system will certainly start to see diminished
returns, I believe that those people who use this system correctly will
be able to benefit for many years to come.
Social bookmarking is not a trend that is simply here today and gone tomorrow.
With major players like Yahoo joining in, you can bet that social bookmarking
has a hopeful future.
When used effectively, social bookmarking will bring you one-way backlinks,
free traffic, increased exposure, and eventually sales from a long-term
effort. Just like your search engine optimization, you should take a natural
approach to social bookmarking. This technique goes way beyond getting
traffic. This is a long-term strategy that can help you to acquire quality
inbound links and gain high search engine rankings when used appropriately.
