Monday, December 19, 2005

Tip: How to Use Tags To Increase Your Traffic

In today's post I want to cover a couple of ways to increase the traffic to your web site or blog.

This tip uses technorati and delicious tags as a way to increase the chances that people who are searching for the topics that you are writing about in your blog will be able to find you.

If you are not familiar with technorati, please click here to go there. In the words of Technorati, "It is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs."

It is a tool that people who read and publish weblogs use to find things. It can also be used by weblog publishers, like you and me, to help those who are searching for information.

The way this works is through the use of tags. A tag is like a subject or category. By tagging the post in your blog you are helping people that are searching for that tag to find you.

Technorati's tags page

Technorati's tags help page. They explain how to format tags better than I can.

Examples;






So now that I have place the above tags on this post, if someone is looking for those tags they will see an entry to this page there.

The next part of this tip on increasing your web traffic via del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a social networking site among other things. It allows you to keep all your links to information on the internet in one place and to share them with others. It is the sharing that makes this site so powerful. You can share your links between your work and home computers for instance. This way you have your list of favorites readily available at all times.

For example if I wanted to give you all my links that are related to tips I would give you the following link;

del.icio.us/kfitzgerald/tips

By providing you this link I have shared many web sites and blogs with you. If you visit any of these sites then you will be adding to their traffic. So as a publisher what you want is for your blog or web site to be listed in del.icio.us and the best way to do that is to create a list of your own. And start sharing it with others.

Of course you will also have to ensure that your blog / web site has a reason for people to want to visit it and add it to there list.

Also of interest and another way to view tags on del.icio.us is to use the tag feature which allows you to see all the sites and blogs listed under a given tag.

For example if I wanted to give you all the sites on del.icio.us that have been tagged with tips I would give you the following link;

del.icio.us/tag/tips

below are examples of technorati tags for this section.







And finally over at Freshblog has a very interesting post about a JavaScript that combines the bookmarklet functions for delicious and Yahoo, titled Bookmarklet Mashup for Del.icio.us and Yahoo MyWeb.

3 comments:

Richard said...

Nice post. Do you find you get more traffic from Technorati or del.icio.us using these techniques? Also, how many tags per post do you think is sufficient without going overboard?

Please try a game of Tagman which is hangman for Technorati tags. The point of the game is to make browsing the top tags a little more fun. Let me know if it is, indeed, fun. Thanks.

Coupon Deal said...

I have noticed that your sidebar looks broken when viewed with firefox. I see some code but not links, etc.

Richard said...

Hi. Back again (about a year later). I'm working on using tags w/o linking to Technorati. Try TagBuildr to create a list of tags that will work for Technorati (but don't link to their site). I like Technorati but their site is too slow and I think they have too many backlinks already.