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.

On May 25th, 2006, I wrote a report called ‘Tagging Secrets’ that I sold on Clickbank. The report sold really well because it was one of the first infoproducts released to discuss tagging and social bookmarking. It made it to the top 10 for a few categories on Clickbank. So I was happy about that.

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Many people like to use social media sites in order to gain popularity, and to heavily increase their traffic if a story that they write hits the front pages of many of the top social media sites.

The problem with some of the social media sites, is that they don’t provide much search engine benefit, because they either use a redirection URL to connect people with your page, or they simply use the “nofollow” tag on your links. (What is nofollow?) Whichever they use, they pass on no search engine ranking benefit, and many of those sites have high PR.

When building links, having traffic sources in mind is a good idea, but your main focus should be links that have “dofollow” (What is dofollow?) because that will increase your search engine rankings, will should be your main goal for your traffic source. Millions of people use Google daily… why not bring some of them who are your for a site like yours, right to your site.

So, here are some of the best social media sites to use for both traffic and search engine rankings:

Digg (PR8)
Many people are already Digging their articles, so continue doing this.

Mixx (PR6)
Mixx is a great up and comer, which makes it a lot easier to rank your articles and pages on the front of Mixx, and you get search engine ranking benefits from your pages and posts being on Mixx.

IndianPad (PR6)
This is a great social media site geared towards the people of India, but since they are growing so fast in all aspects of the internet, this is a great market to reach out to. There are some technology articles on there that have nothing to do with India, that are ranking well, so you definitely have a shot!

Metafilter (PR7)
This is also a great site to submit your articles, posts, and pages.

Reddit (PR8)
A recommendation from a reader to put this on here… it looks decent!

I hope this has expanded your social media selection a little bit, and helped you to focus your traffic building efforts with your link building efforts.

P.S. Be sure to add your site to the profile pages on these different sites!