The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
January 2007, Volume 6, Issue 1

Tag You're It: The Benefits of Social Tagging

by Holly Conrad, Client Services Manager, iProspect

I’m addicted to online shopping. Trekking to a department store, navigating the parking lot and making my way through crowds just isn’t my cup of tea. One of my favorite websites to browse and shop is Amazon because they offer reviews, related products, and have a great return process. So when I discovered that they started using a new way to categorize products, I was excited. It’s called “tagging.”

What are Tags?

Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. It is a word or phrase associated with a product or piece of information. A Web user can assign a word or phrase that he/she finds relevant to a photo, video clip, Web page, blog post, etc. This is done so that the user can easily locate content later, or so that other users can find the same content based on the user’s keyword classification. In Amazon’s case, they allow users to tag the products they sell. In other cases, like Flickr and blogs, tags are used to categorize photos and blog posts. Gmail is another good example of where tagging is used. Have you ever filed an email and forgotten where you put it? Gmail actually allows users to tag emails. The flexibility of tagging emails with terms you associate their content with, makes it much easier to find saved emails later.

Tags do not form a hierarchy like file folders. You can assign as many tags to a piece of information as you like, and you can rename or delete the tags in some cases depending on the website. So, tagging can be a lot easier and more flexible than fitting your information into preconceived categories or folders.

Tags are inherently user subjective, and so depending on the site, there can be hundreds to millions of tags. You can usually find an index of these tags in what is called a “tag cloud.” Tag clouds are often a nice visual representation where more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Each word or phrase in the tag cloud is a link to the collection of items that have been labeled with that tag. Below is an example of a tag cloud.

tag cluster

How and When Should Tags be Used?

Okay, so what does this mean to marketers? Well, since tags categorize content in many different ways, users actually create new Web pages, or add to other pages that have already been tagged, every time they tag a product, file or blog post. For example, your site may already contain ten categories of products that you have created for visitors to browse through, however, offering the ability for users to tag makes it possible to have your visitors create more category pages for your website, with the potential to increase real estate within the search engines.

Some items to keep in mind when allowing tagging on your site:

If you want to allow tagging on your website, you can either create or buy software that will allow you to do so.
Tag clouds should be HTML, not Flash or Javascript, so search engine bots can crawl and index any new pages that are created.
The tag name should be dynamically added into the title of each new page.
Make sure your tag clouds are available in many places on your site, thus helping to improve your internal linking.
Keep you tag clouds relevant – allow mini tag clouds (a smaller version of the tag cloud) that show popular tags from the past week, or month, and so on.
Show your tag clouds in different ways to keep the look fresh – use different fonts or colors to emphasize popular tags as well as outdated tags.
In addition to font sizes to identify popularity, show the number of times the tag was used in parentheses next to the tag name.

Tagging can be beneficial to some sites and not to others. Your site definitely has to have enough content to support it. Tagging can be a useful tool to help you identify how your audience thinks, while increasing the ways your content can be organized and categorized. The more ways your site content can be categorized, the more chances you have to gain online exposure and capture new audiences.

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The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article: January 2007, Volume 6, Issue 1

Tag You're It: The Benefits of Social Tagging

The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
January 2007, Volume 6, Issue 1