MaineBusiness.com

Tagging, Web 2.0 and Internet Marketing

You may have heard of the term "Web 2.0" in the mainstream media this year, or noticed it floating near the most popular blog topics at Technorati. While what Web 2.0 is exactly may be debatable, one of its more popular tenets is the concept of tagging.

Tagging is a new way of organizing data on the Internet. Tagging is adding labels to specific items, such as photos, music, Web pages or blog posts. For example, you can upload your photos to Flickr and tag them with different labels. A photo of Market St. Eat's front door might be tagged, "Portland, ME", "Restaurant," or "Bacon." (Mmmmm...bacon.)

For an example, here's a Flickr page for the tag "Portland, Maine."

Why is this important to you as an Internet marketer?

Because tagging is a very social way of organizing information. If you're blogging, you should be tagging your posts. For instance, you may already have categories for your blog posts. This blog has categories on Business Blog Marketing, Email Marketing and Search Engine Marketing. Categories are types of tags.

However, you may blog about an item that's part of the zeitgeist, but doesn't quite rate a category. For example, I might create a post about a marketing lesson I learned from the New England Patriots home opener. I'm not going to be blogging about the Pats often enough to create a category for them, but I can take advantage of that post by tagging it with Patriots, football, or Deion Branch.

How does this help? Well, it helps both traditional search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) and blog search engines (Technorati, Ice Rocket, etc.) understand what your post is about and rank it appropriately. It also creates more links into your post and drives more traffic to it.

Now, I don't know that many people searching for Deion Branch will be looking for Internet Marketing advice, but it's possible.

For a better example of how you can harness popular searches to drive qualified traffic to your site, and how to create these tags, please read "Tagging Your Posts in TypePad." (Aside: TypePad has made it easier to add tags of late.)

I haven't bothered tagging Internet Marketing 101's posts because of the registration this site requires. However, for the sake of showing you an example, here goes.

Tags: Web 2.0 | Tags | lonelygirl15

(That last tag may give you an idea of the downside of tagging...it's easily abused. As more people tag "inappropriately" to rank artificially high or drive unqualified traffic to their site, tagging may become devalued as a way of finding relevant material.)

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