Tag and Ping

Tag and ping could be considered to be the son of blog and ping. It is in effect the same as blog and ping but with one addition.. the blog posts contains tags.

What are Tags

Tags are labels that you attach to your blog post that describe what the blog is about. They are in effect the keywords, even though they describe what the blog is about they don't need to be contained in the post, although they almost always are.

As an example a blog entry dealing with optimization might use the American spelling but the tags could include the English spelling even though it wasn't used in the blog post.

What does it look Like

Here is a blog entry from one of may blogs

The tags are at the bottom of the post (most common). Blogger doesn't have any tag creation tools so I used an external online tool http://www.egmstrategy.com/ice/tag-generator.cfm.

TagClouds- Organising Tags

Although tags are visible to the reader they aren't actually meant for the human reader. They are there to help services that organise the posts using them.

The most common way of organising them is in the form of a Tag cloud. Here is how Technorati displays the tags.

There are two things to note:

1. The more popular are shown as being bolder

2. The Tags are links. Clicking on a tag will take you to a page that lists the Blogs containing those tags. Below is the what i got when I clicked the web 2.0 tag.

So tag and ping is blog and ping but this time you tag your posts. As with blog and ping tag and ping as been over hyped by the Internet marketing fraternity and of course misused.

So tag your posts and ping the blog aggregators like Technorati using services www.pingomatic.com but don't buy software that creates posts with tags and spams the engines.

Tag blog and ping work but keep it real by:

1. Creating real and useful posts

2. Tagging the posts with appropriate tags and don't overdo the number of tags. A post with 10 words and 8 tags probably isn't really useful.

3. Ping the blog aggregators to let them know.

Common Tag Questions

How do you create tags?

See http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html and for an online tag creator see http://www.egmstrategy.com/ice/tag-generator.cfm

How do you create a tagcloud?

The easiest way is to go to www.tagcloud.com who offer a free service that will generate a tag cloud from the RSS feed of your blog. There are also add-ons for Wordpress http://wordpress.org/support/topic/31578.

Aren't Tags the same as Meta Keyword Tags?

In a way they are. Except

•  They are visible to the visitor whereas the meta keyword tags aren't.
• They are themselves links

Related Articles and Resources:

• Blog and Ping
• Social BookMarking
• Blogging