by Lisa Ann Ginger, 5/30/2006

Fed up with being shovelled content by search engine algorithms, a segment of searchers have switched to tagging and social bookmarking to find online information. Can you capitalize off this new wave of search?

What is tagging?

Tags are basically keywords. A tag can be a category or a subject. When we talk about tagging, all we are basically referring to is how you summarize what your webpage or site is about.

Is it about dogs? If so, then you might want to use the tag, "dogs". What else is your site (or blog) about? Perhaps German Shepherds, Golden Retrievers, dog training, and puppy toys. Well, then all these would make great tags as well.

So the concept of tagging is not really that much different from your standard keywords. But there's an interesting difference between using tags and using keywords in the hopes of getting some traffic to your site.

As an internet marketer optimizing a site for the search engines, you're generally taught to select a keyword (or keyphrase) and stick with that keyword throughout a single page. A single page on your site becomes the official "dog training" page or whatever keyword you chose.

You can most certainly create a page that revolves around dog training and puppy toys, but the search engines will get confused when it comes to categorizing your site. The fact that you're trying to rank well for both keyphrases will dilute them both out. In the end, you won't rank real high for either term.

So with search engine optimization, a single page equals one keyword (or keyphrase) to get the optimum effect. When you want to rank well for another related term, you know you need to create an entirely separate page. But with tagging, you can select several keywords (or tags) for each page of your site and not be penalized. In fact, you actually get rewarded for selecting a number of related tags rather than just one.

With tagging optimization, a single page equals a chance to rank high for many tags. As you can imagine, this can really help you maximize your efforts. If every page can rank well for a dozen terms, it's as though you just wrote a dozen pages instead of one.

Obviously, the search engines don't rank based on tags (they have their million dollar algorithms), but many other sites do. Many of the Social Bookmarking sites use tags to help organize their content. And many of these sites are highly trafficked.