In the “olden” days of the web, when there weren’t very many sites to worry about, “search engines” used a directory style of searching. That meant you could submit your web site and it would be added to the directory under the appropriate sub-heading. Sometimes those submissions were done electronically, other times they passed in front of a set of human eyes before they made it to the directory. Today, those directories still exist but they are not nearly as popular as before. Yahoo.com’s directory, for example, used to appear prominently on its homepage and now it has been relegated to a small link above the search line. DMOZ.org remains one of the more famous “human-reviewed” directories.
The problem with directories is that they are created and imposed structures and not every site can so easily fit within the defined parameters of a directory. Moreover, duplication exists. Are hobbies “past times” or “sports” or “leisure and recreation”?
This is what made Google so popular and revolutionary: they made search “organic” by using an algorithm to determine what a site was about rather than using predefined directory structures.
But even that wasn’t perfect because a greater focus ended up on search engine optimization techniques (SEO) that are arguably easier for search spiders to read and categorize but not always so easy for people. (A spider – or “bot” – is a computer program sent out by search engines to scan your site to determine what it is about. It reports back and that helps the search engine categorize your site for future searches).
Enter tagging. Tagging can be thought of as a human version of what a search spider does. As people interact with your site, they label it with their own tags as a way to quickly categorize what it is about. These tags are just the first part of the process, though, because they are shared at tagging/bookmarking sites…sites that are basically online, shared “favorites” folders. These sites include:
These tags, then, become human-created labels or keywords for your site. If you’re a mechanic and someone has tagged your site as “car repair” in their bookmarking account on http://del.icio.us/, then others who type in “car repair” on that site will find your URL (as well as any other URLs with a similar tag).
This is particularly beneficial to businesses with sites that are difficult for spiders to understand (perhaps because of a lack of unique keywords) or if your tag is a popular term and you have no hope of getting into the first 1000 pages of Google.
To start, create an account at these sites and tag your own site with appropriate keywords. To make your tags really helpful, find other (non-competing) sites that your niche customers use and tag those too, so that your tags become the “go to” source for people looking for related information.
Tagging is still in its infancy and has its share of problems (such as no standardization between tags). But that is soon to change. Get in now on the “ground floor” and leverage tags to build traffic to your site.
