What Is Tagging or Technorati Tags

An Introduction

Have you heard about tagging? How about Technorati tags? In a nutshell, it's the act of labelling a blog entry with a keyword freely chosen by the author. So, if Mary writes an entry into her music blog and tags that entry as "country music" then, she'll end up in Technorati (a blog indexing service) under "country music". There are no search engine algorithms or keyword density to worry about. And the more often she blogs and tags, the more often she'll appear in the first page of that tag. If you go to http://www.technorati.com/tags/marketing at time of writing, I have 6 links on that Technorati Tag page to different entries on my blog. Technorati tag pages are also among my top 25 traffic referrers.

What's the benefit? This is not exhaustive but here are three that matters to an online marketer:
1. People can easily find you. If you tag your entries a keyword that's highly popular, the better your chances are to be listed and found.
2. Get linkbacks. In my example above, the Technorati's marketing page is a PR4 not great but not bad either. Different tag pages also have different rankings
3. Attract people who are interested. People who click through to tag pages are often interested in finding out more about the subject matter. Much like searching on a search engine. So you have another avenue to reach these people besides search engines

Now, this is a very simplistic explanation how it all works there's a little more to that (isn't there always) and it requires a little bit of imagination to understand. Right now, you're probably wondering how do I add Technorati tags to my blog? That is actually the simplest thing and it takes no more than 2 seconds - really! It's not like SEO where you have to actively work on it.

Tagging an entry is a simple 2 step process:
1. Add a link formatted like this to your each entry. You can have different tags for each entry, you can also have multiple tags. Most people put this at the bottom of their entry.
<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/(your-keyword-here)" rel="tag">(your-keyword-here)</a> into your blog entry.
2. Then ping your blog like you should always do.
3. You want more? There's none :-)

For example,
Mary writes about a new song by Faith Hill this entry is relevant to music, country music, Faith Hill so she can enter the following into her blog entry
<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/music" rel="tag">music</a>
<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/country+music" rel="tag">country music</a>
<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/faith+hill" rel="tag">Faith Hill</a>
She can put these links at the bottom of her entry or contextual. When she pings her blog, Technorati will come and look at the entry, capture the tags and categorizes the entry at their website so that Mary's blog entry will show up in these Technorati Tag pages
http://www.technorati.com/tags/music
http://www.technorati.com/tags/country+music
http://www.technorati.com/tags/faith+hill

Final note, even though many refer to it as Technorati Tags since they popularized tagging, once you tag your pages or blog entries, other sites who respect tags can recognize it too. At the moment it's still unclear how far tagging will take us. Maybe one day search engines will recognize tags too and who knows - they may already be secretly reviewing those Technorati tags.