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Nothing seems to have turned the SEO world around as much as blogs.  This is because blogs initially started as personal journals.  Now however websites are beginning to realize their value in building an online reputation and helping promote a website.

In this article we look at one aspect of blogging.  That is tagging, and it’s impact on SEO now and into the future.

What are tags?

Tags are generally one-word descriptors that you can assign to any URL. Tags don’t contain quotation marks or whitespace, but are otherwise unrestricted.

Basically, a tag tells a site like Technorati what your page is about.

What are tags good for?

There are multiple uses for tagging.  From the content creators perspective, tags help predefine what the post is about.  Then, when a blog service is pinged, the service will add the post to the category that relates to your tag.

For example, if your blog is about widgets, then you will tag all your posts with “widgets.” Then, you can go to a service like one of those listed above to see not only your post about widgets, but also all the other widget related posts, if they are tagged as such.

Tagging also has a personal use. 

If you use services like Flickr, or even Yahoo! Or Google search features you can tag search history and saved web pages.  Then you can easily see all pages you’ve visited or saved that correspond to that tag.

So why use tags?

Well, as mentioned above, tags can help you pre-qualify what the content on the page is about.  You can also use multiple tags on your content if you feel you need it.

For example, if your widgets post is more specific – say “automatic blue widgets” then you could tag your post multiple ways - “widgets” “automatic widgets” and “blue widgets”.  Then your post will appear in all three of the above categories.

I guess another way to think of tagging is how we used to think about the meta keywords tag.

With this tag you used to be able to tell the search engine what a site or page was about merely by having it index the contents of the meta keywords tag.

Obviously webmasters soon figured this out so began stuffing keywords into the tag, so now search engines depreciate the tag altogether.

Which leads to my next point.  That is that like all other SEO efforts, this one will likely be depreciated over time as tags become over used.

But for the time being proper tagging still has value.

Another reason to use tags is that the main search engines are starting to experiment with them.  As I mentioned earlier, you can tag saved pages in your Yahoo! Myweb account, and you can tag your history in your Google account.

Plus, you can also tag your blog posts in such a way that services like Technorati understand the tag and assign the blog to the tagged category.

And tagging doesn’t have to be limited to your blog posts. While tagging started there, the tags could apply to any content on the site.

For example, if you write articles for your site, why not tag them and create a feed for them?

Then, the articles could be treated similar to blogs – in that the feed will get crawled and indexed, and the articles will appear in the tag category of your favorite blog search engine.

How do you use tags?

This is the really great part about tagging – it’s so easy to implement.

If you are posting using blog software then the work is pretty much done.  The categories you create in your blog should translate into tags that these services can read.  If not there are many different plugins available which you can download and install into your blog software to allow you to add tags.

If not, it is simply a matter of adding some tagging to your hyperlink code in your posts.

To assign a Technorati tag (for example) simply adding rel=’tag” to the hyperlink code will tell Technorati that this is a tag.

Then, once you ping Technorati with a new post, it will read the tag and assign your blog post to that area.

If you use a service like Flickr to host images, you can also tag your images in a similar fashion.  If you allow the public to view your images, then perhaps it would be worthwhile to take the time to tag them as well.

Remember, while I mention blogs and blogging above, really tagging can be done on any fresh content such as new articles, press releases or even just sections of a website that change regularly.

Why tagging is important

Because of the rapid growth of the web, it is becoming increasingly difficult for web users to effectively navigate through the billions of search results out there.

Tagging allows them to easily store and share their favorite links.  No longer do they have to be bound to their desktop and a local bookmarks folder.

Now, users can save their favorite pages on sites like del.icio.us and Yahoo!s My Web and even share their favorite links.

Further, if they search for product or service by tag then you want to be sure your site is found for these tags.

So if you are looking for other non-search ways to try and promote your website, consider tagging.  While it’s not likely going to be the “next big thing” in terms of SEO, it can help drive traffic that you may not have otherwise received.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com