Tagging is the essence of the social bookmarking sites I outlined in the previous Social Bookmarking Explained article.

Tags provide you with a way to categorize your image, post, or web page. Keywords are virtually always used to organize topics on the internet. Tags are really just more of the same. The users tag a web page or an image with a keyword (or key phrase). By doing so, all the other web pages, posts, and images with the same tag can be organized together. This means you can find things easier. The related information is compiled together for you so you don’t have to search all over for it.

So tags aren’t really any different than keywords. Just in case you’re still not sure what I’m talking about, here’s a real simple example. Let’s say you write an article about cell phones. You would use the tag “cell phones” to help categorize it. This is hardly rocket science at all, so please don’t fret over it. Tags equal keywords.

I’m sure you already know the importance of keywords and key phrases and how you should go about finding them. If not, please review some of the Keyword Research articles I’ve put together for you.

The difference is that organizing information by tags the way some of these innovative sites are doing turns them into more of a browsing tool than a searching tool. Many people find it a little bit messy, but at the same time, that’s what so many like about it. It’s free structure is a breath of fresh air compared to the rigidity of the search engines. Type in the wrong keyword in Google and you’ll just get pages of results related to something you’re not interested in at all.

But with tagging, you get to browse through the information. Most of the tagging sites will display a list of related tags for each search you make. This way if you don’t see what you like with your first search, you can keep browsing.

If you want to see tagging in action, I suggest visiting Technorati or Delicious.

What is Social Media?

Before the Internet, the main media types consisted of newspapers, magazines, television, radio, Yellow Pages, and catalogs. 

While many of these media sources are still alive and well today, the Internet has added a new source, one that is called by many people as social media. This InlineSEO.com blog you are currently reading is an example of social media. 

Here are some examples of what social media (like this blog) can do compared to the ’static media’ of the past.

Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: The following method no longer works… Mr. Wong has disabled the use of groups.  But, you can still read it, get the technique, and try and find other social news sites that have groups and apply the same concept (submitting the same article to similar groups, for more backlinks).  Check out my article on Using Searchles for Link Building.  It uses the same concept as below for a different site.

I recently wrote about some dofollow social media sites and one of those was Mister Wong.  This PR 7 dofollow social media site is awesome.  While doing some link building, I decided to give it a try, and as I was playing around, I found a FANTASTIC way to submit articles to Mister-Wong quickly, and so that it appears on multiple pages, instead of just your profile (which means more and more backlinks).

Follow these steps to get multiple backlinks:

1)    Sign-up for Mister Wong.

2)    If you have Firefox, go to the “Creating Bookmarks Page” and install the Firefox add-on, and restart your browser.

3)    Then, on the Mister-Wong site, go to the “Groups Page”.  Here you can join or create new groups.  Now there are advantages and disadvantages to both creating and joining groups.  For creating a group, you ensure that there will be less bookmarks submitted per group, meaning all of your links get the maximum link juice.  But, since you’ll be the only one in the group, it’ll only be linked to pretty much from your page only.  Now if you join an existing group, you have to share the link juice with all of the other people’s bookmarks, but there’s also more links pointing to the group, since there’s multiple users in the group.  It’s a balance, and I suggest joining some and creating some.

4)    I suggest you be a part of 10 groups at least.  Now, when naming your groups, you want to name them to be something related to what your site is about.  For Link Building Bible, some possible ones could be “SEO” “links” “backlinks” “blogs” “ blogging” “linking” “linkbuilding” etc… (There is a 12 character maximum for group names… so be creative… I could do “links 1” “links 2” “backlinks 2” “seo 3” etc.)

5)    Now, start using the Firefox add-on buttons to add sites to Mister-Wong (or just navigate to the site and submit your posts and pages there from the Add page, though it takes longer.)

6)    When adding, make sure you submit to as many groups as possible and to ones that are relevant.   Then, for each group you submit to, that’s an extra link.  So, if you have 50 pages on your site, and you submit each one to 10 groups each, that’s  550 links. (50×10= 500 for the groups, and 50 on your Mister-Wong profile page.)

7)    BEWARE: Using many tags is useless, since the links on the Tag pages are nofollow.  But the links on the group pages are dofollow, as well as the links on your profile.  The tags are basically to help add relevance to your article, so do use a few tags, just don’t go overboard thinking it’s going to help you with link building, as it really won’t.

Follow these steps, and you’ll be able to create many backlinks to your site.  To give your profile and your groups even more link juice, and more crawlability, find ways to link to your Mister-Wong profile from other pages, and find ways to link to your Mister-Wong groups from related pages.  (A good way to do it would be to leave a comment on a related Gather article to your Mister-Wong groups.)

People LOVE social media sites, and if people can find dofollow social media sites for link building, then they jump all over it!  I have previously written about the top dofollow social media sites, and two up and coming dofollow social media sites.  (For those who don’t know what dofollow is and why dofollow is important, please read my article entitled: What is DoFollow? What is NoFollow? Follow Along and See.)

I have a few more of these dofollow social media sites for you to enjoy.  Some of you may already know of these sites.  Sorry in advance.  But, there are many people brand new to link building and seo and sem, and may not know of these sites.

Just submit your article to these social media sites for some nice backlinks.

Mylinkvault.com
Bibsonomy.org
Mister-Wong.com

Hope you enjoy these!

I recently wrote about The Best Social Media Sites for Link Building, highlighting the top social media sites that have a dofollow link to your sites, which means more link juice for you.

But, not everyone can get to the top of Digg, even if you have a fantastic post. So, I set out to find some great up-and-coming social media sites with dofollow links to your articles. I have found 2 of them that are great, and I will break down my thoughts on them:

http://blogoria.com

Blogoria is a “city” where people can submit their blogs, and the newest posts are cataloged on the front page, along with being able to search for different blogs in the different categories they offer. The more often you post, the more often your articles will be on the front page of blogoria. It is also great for networking with other bloggers that may have the same interest as you. Best of all, the links to your blog are dofollow! (What is dofollow?)

http://www.spicypage.com

Spicy Page is awesome, because it allows you to vote for blogs as a whole. You don’t have to compete with other articles or anything like that, people take your blog as a whole package and vote for it. They can also share it with friends, put your blog on their watchlist, and there’s also a really cool “blog this” feature. By securely adding your blog’s login details, you can blog about cool websites that you find with the click of a button from Spicy Page.

They also have a great “Startups” section, that allows you to post your startup in the site, and let people vote on it, and they display the top startups.

Overall, these are two great resources for getting some nice traffic, for networking with other bloggers, and also for getting some dofollow backlinks to your site, especially the internal pages.