Tag and Ping - Social Bookmarking Secrets

Tag and Ping, these three words have suddenly become the mantra that every body seems to be chanting. Its almost reminiscent of the days when Blog and Ping was being sold as the sole panacea for indexing and getting traffic to your sites.

The "Tag And Ping" method that every body is talking about is nothing but taking social bookmarking and leveraging it for SEO.


While social bookmarking has been around for quite some time and was originally intended to help users categorize and store their favorite links online, SEO professionals soon saw the potential for utilizing this to get their sites to rank high.

Tag And Ping can be used to promote any type of website, whether its a website monetized with Google Adsense, your Blog, Your sales page or even a site promoting affiliate products.

You know, luckily not many people know that Social Bookmarking can be used as a link building methodology and this presents you a great opportunity, as a Tag Automator subscriber, to stay one step ahead of the competition.

The strategies explained over the next few emails will help you get an unbelievable avalanche of traffic to your sites and the Tag Automator software suite will multiply that many times more.

So stay tuned and make the most of this strategy.

So, What Is Social Bookmarking ?

Social bookmarking is utilizing a web service, where users create a public repository of bookmarks pertaining to sites that they like.

The concept of social bookmarking dates back to 1996 with the launch of itList.com, followed by services like Blink and Hotlinks and many more. But, the popularity of Social Bookmarking increased with the advent of the most popular bookmarking site till date, del.icio.us.

Social bookmarking sites organize their content using tags. Social bookmarking sites are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags.

And What is a Tag?

A tag is basically a keyword. It is a label that you categorize a website under. For example if I was tagging this website, I would tag it under "tag and ping", "tag", "ping" etc.

Tagging is simply a way to find a website that I bookmark without remembering where you put it. You can just enter a tag to find websites that you have marked with certain tags.

The tags act as a way to quickly find your bookmarks without remembering where you put them. This is why the bookmark sites allow you to assign more than one tag.

These bookmark sites allow you to share your personal bookmarks with the public. This is where the term "social" comes into play. When you bookmark a site other people can also find the site that you bookmarked if they enter the same tag that you classified the site under.

Not only can you find the sites that you tagged under certain keywords but so can everyone else.

These bookmarks and tags may seem like geekspeak, but from an SEO standpoint these can build you a massive amount of backlinks which seem to originate from authority sites.

Mike Freije

Mike Freije, contributes articles on Internet Marketing for http://www.articlemarketinghome.com . For more information on Tag and Ping, visit http://www.payakeyword.com

Tag And Ping Your Way To More Website Traffic

What are called Social Bookmarking sites are websites that organize their content using tags, instead of a directory structure like Yahoo. A typical social bookmarking site is Tag4Profit.com

Social Bookmarking is an increasingly popular way to locate and classify websites. Instead of one editor categorizing sites in a directory, tagging takes a populist approach. The more people who tag a website with a keyword, the more likely it is that other people will see those tags and social bookmarks, and also visit the site.


Instead of paying to be listed at the top of search rankings, social bookmarking lets people decide what are the best websites associated with a certain keyword.

At least in theory.

The process can be gamed to some extent. Dozens of accounts at social bookmarking sites can be created for the purpose of creating tags listing a particular website.

There is also the problem with misspellings and people using misleading tags to associate with a web page.

However, since creating tags is still for the most part a manual, tedious process, athis greatly reduces the likelihood of widespread bookmarking spam. Moreover, a complaint from those using a service can cause such spam to be quickly deleted.

A tag is basically a keyword. It is a label that you categorize a website under.

The tags act as a way to quickly find your bookmarks without remembering where you put them. This is why the bookmark sites allow you to assign more than one tag.

You can also share your personal bookmarks with the public. This is where the term social in social bookmarking comes into play. When you bookmark a site other people can also find the site that you bookmarked if they enter the same tag that you classified the site under.

Tags can also be included in blog posts. This also helps the sites find web content that is being categorized by a certain keyword.

There are two general ways this increases traffic to your website.

First, people using social bookmarking websites search on a keyword. When your site, tagged with that keyword, comes back in the results, that link to your site can be clicked on to bring the person to your website.

Second, since the social bookmarking tags can themselves be tagged by others, some tag pages will become authoritative resources for the best websites. What this means is that a page of tags for sites about, for example, 'polar bears' may become so valuable that webmasters will link to that page on the social bookmarking website as a resource about 'polar bears'.

In short, this gives the social bookmarking tags page a good page rank. Being linked to, or tagged, from such authoritative pages increases the value of your website to some search engines, particularly Google. In turn, this will bump your website up the search listings.

Brian Kindsvater

Brian Kindsvater has been marketing online since 1994 and his new Social Bookmarking profit site can be found at http://Tag4Profit.com

Should You Tag and Ping?

You own a blog, and you want to make money from it. How do you do that? Well, to start with you need to get traffic to your blog. It doesn't matter how brilliant the content of your blog is, if nobody ever sees it, then you're never going to make any money from it.

So how do you go about getting more visitors to your site? Well, unless you're willing to pay money for a Google Adwords campaign or something similar, then you need to make sure the major search engines like you. Or more to the point, convince the search engines that other websites like you! This is known as link popularity, and is often used by the search engines to determine whether or not to improve the ranking of a site in search results. The more links you have from other websites pointing to your website, the more "popular" your site is deemed to be, and the better its ranking.

Of course, like most strategies for improving traffic, linking has been abused and overdone in a big way with Internet marketers. They set up thousands of links from sites that had nothing to do with their own blog, and got rewarded for it. Now, however, search engines are mostly interested in relevant links. So if you have a blog about grooming dogs, and you have a link from a dog site, great. If the links is from a site about cheese, however, chances are it won't help with your link popularity.

So the bottom line is that there's no point joining any type of link farm, where you can buy or trade links with sites that have no relevancy to yours. You need to focus on obtaining links from complementary sites, which is best done by finding those sites online and writing to the site owner. Time consuming, but it pays off. Particularly if the site that links to you has a high page rank in Google.

If this all sounds like a lot of work - guess what, it is! That's where the tag and ping technique comes into it. Basically, you list your blog on an authority site, and every time you update your blog, you let them know. The authority site needs can be either a social bookmarking site, like del.icio.us, or a blog directory, like Technorati. When you list your blog, you include a list of tags, or keywords, that your blog is about. So going back to the dog grooming example, you would use tags like "dog", "dogs", "dog grooming" and so on. That way, when people go to these authority sites and search for dog grooming, your site will be on the list.

The second part of the technique is to ping the sites you list your blog with. A ping is simply like giving the site a courtesy phone call to tell them your blog has a new post on it. It's all done automatically, either by visiting the site and clicking on an update option for your blog, or you can set up a ping facility at a site like Pingomatic. Then all you need to do is refresh your ping request, and Pingomatic will automatically notify as many blog directories as you choose. This is a great way of letting lots of places at once know you've updated your blog.

It takes a few minutes to add your site to sites like del.icio.us, or to create a new job in Pingomatic. But the good thing is that once it's done, it only takes a minute or two to update these authority sites, so that they can list your freshest content immediately.

To help you get started with tag and ping, I recommend that you check out an automated social bookmarking tool called the Auto Social Poster. This tool will allow you to automatically bookmark pages of your Wordpress blog and then tag and ping those pages. It does the tedious work so that you can focus on other aspects of your business.

Tag and ping is quite simple, so give it a try, and once you get the hang of it you'll find it's almost an automatic thing to tag and ping every time you post something new to your blog. Even better, you'll start to see an improvement in your traffic and ranking.

Allen Jesson

Allen Jesson writes for several sites including an internet marketing company and one that helps you make money. Please click here for more on an exciting new tool for social bookmarking.