Now that you have the basic understanding of tag and ping
and social bookmarking it is time to get into some more
advanced strategies. By following a plan of action tag and
and ping an social bookmarking will simply become a tool
that is used in your efforts rather than your sole area of
focus.
I do not recommend tag and ping and social
bookmarking as a primary focus because traffic derived
through creating good quality websites through rankings in
the SERPs should be your primary focus. Social bookmarking
and tagging and pinging should simply be seen as a tool to
help meet that end.
Get your Blog Fired Up for Tagging
and Pinging
There are a few social bookmarking services that
endlessly search for new content to add to their indexes.
The goal of this section is to get you going by setting up
your blog to help these services find and index your blog
posts automatically.
There are several blog platforms that
support tags:
b2
Blogger
Ecto
MarsEdit
Movable Type
Nucleus
Radio UserLand
TypePad
Wordpress
If you don't currently have a blog then you can set up
a free blog at
Blogger.com. I personally use Wordpress because it has
a bunch of "plug-ins" that can be added for the purpose of
tagging and pinging.
You can download Wordpress for
free from
wordpress.org. Follow their installation instructions
to get it set up on your server. If you have cPanel on
your hosting account, you can quickly install a Wordpress
blog using Fantastico.
For the purpose of example I will
show you how to add tags to Wordpress blogs. Wordpress is
by far the best tool for tagging and pinging so I will be
covering Wordpress as "The" tagging and pinging solution.
The Basic Idea
This is the basic flow of tagging and then pinging your
blog posts:
You create a blog post just like you would normally.
Add relevant "tags" at the end of your blog post.
Publish your blog post.
Ping the social bookmarking sites
The social bookmarking sites then crawl your blog
post and then indexes it under the tags that you
specified.
Implementing Tags on your Blog
Tags are simple links that are formatted in a way
that the social bookmarking spiders can recognize. They
are basically flags for the social bookmarking sites
that say "hey... Index this content".
[tagname] = The tag that you want your
blog post to be listed under.
rel="tag" after the URL is a special piece of
code telling the bookmarking spiders that this
is a tag.
The example above links to Technorati but you don't
have to link away from your blog if your blog supports
categories (more on that later). Here is another
example:
[tagname] in the URL above is simply
linking to a category that you set up (more
on this in a moment)
The social bookmarking sites will pick up and index
your blog post even if you don't link back to them. The
crucial element of a tag in your blog post is the rel="tag"
code placed directly after the URL. The social
bookmarking sites are looking for this snippet of code
when crawling your blog posts.
Let's say that you want
to tag your blog post about dog training with several
relevant tags to be picked up and indexed by the
bookmarking sites.
First you will want to do some
research. Watch this video:
As you can see from the video I was able to pick out
some relevant tags for dog training without any
guesswork. So I will create the following tags to go at
the end of my blog post:
dog,dogs,dog training,dog-training,puppies
I will need to create the following tags for my blog.
In order for the example above to work you would need
blog categories set up on your blog for each tag. So
from the example above you would need to set up a
category for each of the tags you intend to use.
dog
dogs
dog training
dog-training
puppies
Take a look at the SEO2020 Blog and look at the
categories on the right. These are categories (tags)
that I frequently tag my blog posts under. Look at the
latest blog post and you will see tag code directly
under it where it says "Posted in".
Wordpress is doing this automatically. The best way to
increase exposure is to minimize your work load. It
simply doesn't make sense to manually create all of your
tag URLs. Wordpress can do it for you.
There are several places to get plug-ins for Wordpress
for using tags and Wordpress (the latest version) can
also make use of tags right out of the box without any
plugins.
Set up Wordpress for Tags
The first thing you need to do is add categories (aka.
Tags) to your blog. The purpose of doing this is to be
able to quickly "tag" each of your blog posts. You can
also add categories on the fly when you write a new blog
post and don't yet have a category (tag) for it.
The example above if from the SEO2020 blog, these are
just a few of the categories (tags) that I may tag one
of my blog posts with.
Now that some categories are set up, you can then write
a blog post and tag them automatically:
The red arrow above point to a box where you can add a
new category (tag) on the fly. Below that box you can
check categories (tags) that are relevant to the post.
When you submit your post you will see your tags are
already inserted into the bottom of your post with the
appropriate bookmark spider code inserted:
The code from the above looks like this if you do a view
source:
As more are discovered the list above will be updated.
Problems
The only problem with using the automated method above
is that you have to create a blog category for each tag
and categories you create might not exist yet in the
social bookmarking indexes. If a tag you create doesn't
exist yet then you will have to link to Technorati in
your tag post like this:
Linking to Technorati with a new tag name will create
that new tag in their index.
Creating a new Wordpress category for each new tag can
quickly clutter your user menu with repetitive
categories and it can begin to look ugly and become
potentially confusing to your blog readers.
To get around these issues you will have to install a
Wordpress plugin called SimpleTags
Then activate the plugin by going to "Plugins" in
Wordpress. You will then see a list of your plugins.
Just click activate next to the SimpleTags Plugin.
Using the SimpleTags Plugin
Using this plugin is very easy. When you are finished
typing your post simply enter the following code at the
very end:
[tags]tag number1, tag number2, tag number3[/tags]
[tags] and [/tags] are the basic commands, just put your
tags separated by a comma and a space in-between the
[tags] and [/tags] commands.
This is what the code will look like when you publish
your post:
You can modify the text appearing before your tags:
Simply go to "Plugins" and then "Plugin Editor" then
click "SimpleTags" and modify this line of code:
$pre_replacement = '<p>Tags: ';
Change "Tags:" to whatever you would like to say. By
default this plugin says "Technorati Tags:". I like to
just use the word "Tags:".
Making Sure that Technorati and Icerocket Pick Up Your
Tags
If Icerocket
returns an error then it can't find your RSS/Atom feed or
your tags are not appearing within your RSS feed. Wordpress
automatically updates your rss feed for each new blog post
so this shouldn't be a problem.
2. Do a test post and then
visit technorati to ensure the post appears. It may not
appear right away so give it some time.
Automating the tagging and pinging of your blog posts is
far easier than manually typing code each time. Install
SimpleTags and let Technorati and Icerocket automatically do
your listings. Many social bookmarking sites syndiacate
content from Technorati and Icerocket so you are doing a ton
of advertising by simply adding a little piece of
[tags][/tags] code to the end of each of your blog posts.
To stay up-to-date with the latest articles, tips and
strategies associated with Tag and Ping please visit this Tag and Ping
site to sign up for the free newsletter.
Download the Tag and Ping Primer
"The Tag and Ping
Primer" is designed to accompany the free lessons here
on this site. To get more details about this report visit: The Tag and Ping Primer
.
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