What is Tagging?

Tagging is not new to you, for sure. When you post something on your blog or your social networking page, you tag. You assign keywords that would describe what your post (photos, links, videos, etc.) is about. Furthermore, this online activity means so much in social bookmarking, which is being widely used as an online marketing tool nowadays.

When you social bookmark, you basically do away with folders that categorizes your bookmarks with the help of a tag-based system. When you bookmark a page, aside from providing the URL and a brief description, you assign tags or keywords. Assigning these keywords is much like categorizing your bookmarks, so that you can remember what they are about. So logically, the keywords that you should use to label your bookmarked page should be relevant to the content of the page.

You tag your posts and updates. So what?

An important thing to remember about tagging system is that you actually make your sites findable by keyword. Let us say that you tag a page with "blogging tips". What happens is that a person who is looking for sites about blogging tips and enters the same keywords on the search bar would see the link to your post on the results page. And, to state the obvious, it means traffic for you.

Oops! It does not end with that. Internet users come to social bookmarking services and use them as mini search engines to look for specific sites that could provide them with their specific needs. As these services can help them with this better than the huge search engines, their number of visitors is growing by the day. As mentioned, they search for certain sites because they need something from it, either for a project, research, or for products and services, recreation, and so on. Thus, your social bookmarking services generate "targeted traffic" for your site mainly because of this tag-based system.

As you know, targeted traffic is what keeps an online business alive. Naturally, the people that you want to have in your site are those who have business with it, those who would explore your site beyond its homepage. You want them to stay long enough or come back to avail of your products or services.

Having learned the importance of tagging, you should choose your tags properly. Assign around five tags to each of the page that you want to bookmark, but be sure that they are relevant to the content of the page. Otherwise, this may annoy Internet users and vote against it. Also, be careful of how a bookmarking site separates the tags. Some may require you to use commas, while others require you to use spaces.