1 week into my 3 week Buzz Challenge and I need to pick up the pace. I’ve only accomplished 4 of the 57 buzz challenges in Ron McDaniel’s book Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing
Admittedly, a few of the buzz challenges I’ve always done, but I’m trying to find new twists on the ideas or bring you resources of value.
With that in mind, let’s tackle tagging.
Ron’s challenge describes tagging as a way of bookmarking your website or blog content using a site like del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site, where anyone can bookmark interesting content. The more people that bookmark a blog post for example, the more likely it will receive more traffic from the social bookmarking site.
The traffic from del.icio.us can be quite good; people have taken the time to bookmark something and often others will be following the bookmarks of specific people. And you’ll gain long tail traffic from bookmarks (unlike sites like digg and reddit which usually just create spikes.) Long tail traffic means traffic will keep filtering through over time as people search other people’s bookmarks.
Another form of tagging is for Technorati, which is a blog search engine. At the bottom of all my posts you’ll see these tags — keywords that highlight what the post is about.
Those tags help Technorati figure out what your content is about. They’ll also help drive traffic from people searching on Technorati (although I’ve never gotten a ton of traffic this way.)
On Technorati you can see what tags are popular or look up any specific tag. For example, here’s what Technorati has on the tag entrepreneurship.
Putting tags on your posts is very easy.
If you use WordPress, I recommend the plugin SimpleTags. It’s ultra-easy to setup and makes tagging very simple. I prefer it to the more popular Ultimate Tag Warrior because SimpleTags is lightweight. I’ve had problems with UltimateTagWarrior slowing things down while posting (and heard other complaints.)
When you install SimpleTags, all you need to do is put tag code around a comma-separated list and it creates the tags for you. The tag code looks like this:
If you’re not on WordPress and your blog software doesn’t offer a plugin to help you out, you can use a tagging service like Free Tag Generator. It does more than create Technorati tags, but it’s simple enough to use. Fill in the words (comma-separated) and submit. The site generates the code you can copy and paste into your blog post.
Tagging your posts through social-bookmarking sites and for Technorati are both simple, easy ways of helping people become aware of your content – and that’s always a good thing!
This brings me back to the action I took a while ago – removing the tag plugin from my site.
Perhaps I’m being naive in my actions, but what I didn’t like is the fact that they take your reader away from your site, and to Technorati.com. I wouldn’t have minded so much had the links opened in a new window.
Help me out here Ben. Was I foolish, or does anyone else have an issue with that?
This brings me back to the action I took a while ago – removing the tag plugin from my site.
Perhaps I'm being naive in my actions, but what I didn't like is the fact that they take your reader away from your site, and to Technorati.com. I wouldn't have minded so much had the links opened in a new window.
Help me out here Ben. Was I foolish, or does anyone else have an issue with that?
David – from what I’ve seen, very few people click the links. I wouldn’t be surprised if people clicked one of the tags and were surprised to land on Technorati’s site though…
I’ve had a few posts show up nicely for popular tags which generated good traffic, but as I pointed out – the traffic is few and far between from Technorati.
David – from what I've seen, very few people click the links. I wouldn't be surprised if people clicked one of the tags and were surprised to land on Technorati's site though…
I've had a few posts show up nicely for popular tags which generated good traffic, but as I pointed out – the traffic is few and far between from Technorati.
I’ve had the opposite experience… I get quite a bit of traffic from Technorati for anotherblogger.com – mostly for tech or political subjects.
I've had the opposite experience… I get quite a bit of traffic from Technorati for anotherblogger.com – mostly for tech or political subjects.
This has been one of those subjects I’ve been meaning to get to. Thanks for making it simple for us, not that it was that difficult in the first place. Just needed someone to light the fire.
This has been one of those subjects I've been meaning to get to. Thanks for making it simple for us, not that it was that difficult in the first place. Just needed someone to light the fire.
I get more than 50% of my search engine traffic to my tag pages created with UTW, and no leaks to Technorati.
You have to have traffic to have to worry about server load.
There were some good performance tweaks available for UTW before WP 2.1 was introduced, but most blogs don’t have enough traffic to worry about it.
UTW for WP2.1 has a couple of teething problems for some people, but I haven’t had any performance issues so far.
I would at least stick nofollow on the Technorati links, but it is much better having them go to internal pages.
I get more than 50% of my search engine traffic to my tag pages created with UTW, and no leaks to Technorati.
You have to have traffic to have to worry about server load.
There were some good performance tweaks available for UTW before WP 2.1 was introduced, but most blogs don't have enough traffic to worry about it.
UTW for WP2.1 has a couple of teething problems for some people, but I haven't had any performance issues so far.
I would at least stick nofollow on the Technorati links, but it is much better having them go to internal pages.
Andy – the problem I’ve had with UTW isn’t server load slowing the blog down, it’s been slowness for posting, editing content through the WordPress Admin. Somehow UTW has just made it a bit clunkier.
But I do like how you’ve created tag pages that link internally but still work for Technorati.
Andy – the problem I've had with UTW isn't server load slowing the blog down, it's been slowness for posting, editing content through the WordPress Admin. Somehow UTW has just made it a bit clunkier.
But I do like how you've created tag pages that link internally but still work for Technorati.
[...] SimpleTags is still the easiest way to get Technorati tags on your blog, to help Technorati users find you. But on Andy Beard’s suggestion I decided to give Ultimate Tag Warrior another try. [...]