Tagging for Traffic

Most bloggers are probably already familiar with Technorati. Many have at least checked to see what other blogs are linking to them. Some may have claimed their blogs, and a few more may have added Technorati as a ping option in their blogging software. What I haven’t seen many sports bloggers do is incorporate tagging into their posts.

What are Tags

In the most general sense, tags are labels assigned to pieces of information. Given our context, tags are kind of like a categorization system for your post (or your blog). The tags can identify key elements of your content, and are typically one to two words. It is common that an individual post will have multiple tags.

How do I tag stuff

Tagging is a fairly simple process. Within each post, you should include a link with the tag name, and the “rel” property set equal to tag. The most common links that I’ve seen are those to Technorati, but that isn’t required for Technorati to see your tags. Most sites that rely on tags will recognize any link as a tag as long as it has the “rel=tag.”

For example, the below code would tag a post with the tag “sports”

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/sports" rel="tag">sports</a>

Depending on your blogging software, tagging can be much simpler than this. If you’re using Movable Type or Wordpress, you’ve been tagging your posts if you use categories. Technorati recognizes the categories from these packages as tags. (A good reason to give your categorization serious thought)

In addition, there are a number of plug-ins available to facilitate adding tags. For this blog I’ve recently begun using Simple Tags and it is incredibly easy to use.

Why do I want to tag stuff

For many bloggers in other areas tagging is a great way to drive additional traffic to your site. As people search for topics on Technorati, they stand a good chance to see your site. It also helps to connect the various parts of the ‘net across single topics. Quick searches on sports tags reveal that while there are a number of posts being tagged with sports terms, it doesn’t appear to be from sports bloggers.

A search of posts tagged with sports shows a number of personal blogs that happened to write about sports. Some more specific searches on baseball and chicago cubs reveal that while some sports bloggers are actively tagging, they appear to be in the minority. In both categories the majority of the tagged posts were from a couple sites. There is definitely room for more.

In addition to traffic from Technorati, tags can help facilitate obtaining traffic from other sites. Since I started tagging on my Tiger site, I routinely get traffic from IceRocket, which was rare in the past.

The other reason for tagging is broader. Tracking a particular topic among sports blogs is a fairly disjointed process. Areas such as tech, have embraced tagging and a search of Technorati can lead a wealth of information. That hasn’t been the case with sports blogs. If more sports bloggers were to begin tagging, we’d all have another source of information.