Tag and Ping Will Be Huge!
If you missed out on the “blog and ping” wave, like I did, you’ll want to keep a very close eye on the new groundswell called “tag and ping”. This will be huge… in fact, it already is. Check out this link and sign up for more information.
I’ve had a “sneak peek” at the course and I’m very impressed. A few years ago you could slap up a blog and get it indexed by the search engines almost immediately. In fact, I did the Google Gatecrash report on it. I slapped up a blog at blogger.com and got it indexed within 48 hours… I also got a site of mine refreshed in the Google index because the blog linked to it. And natually, the on-topic link from the blog to the main site didn’t do it any harm. 
Fast forward a few years and the whole “blog and ping” phenomenon has died down… mainly because it’s not as effective anymore. However, blogs ARE effective communication tools, and the quality blogs still get frequent search engine crawls and high pagerank. Having a blog and using it to communicate to your visitors AND point the search engines to your sites is still an effective marketing method. Anyone can get a blog… just sign up for free at blogger.com.
So, to the new system… tag and ping… what’s it all about?
Well, in a nutshell, how do search engines know what topic each separate blog post is about? They don’t. I’ve blogged about everything from my hedge to my articles to my local beach! That makes blogs difficult to categorize. So… someone smart said that people should use “tags” (like nametags… simple identifying keywords) to let search engines know what the separate posts are about. For example, I would tag my hedge post as “neil shearing, hedge, escallonia”. There are now a whole breed of new search engines crawling blogs and categorizing the posts based on these tags. Want an example? Check out this page…
http://www.technorati.com/blogs/http://www.neilshearing.com
On that page you’ll see the information Technorati has compiled about this blog. When I did my last post, I included the tag “page rank”… and if you search Technorati tags for “page rank” my post appears at the top, at the time of writing. Having this blog listed at Technorati and similar sites is a great way to get “authority” links pointing to this blog. Note, this doesn’t work for “regular” websites, so you’ll need to grab a blog and begin categorizing your posts using tags to benefit.
Technorati is only one site indexing these tags and trying to better categorize all the millions of daily blog posts. By using tags to let them know what your posts are about, you’ll get links and targetted traffic to your blog, and from your blog to your main sites.
This is just a brief overview of “tag and ping”, and I haven’t even touched on “social bookmarking” which has the power to get quality links to your site almost immediately. For an easy-to-understand explanation on these topics, I suggest you head over to this site and sign up for notification of the product release in a few days.
Watch out… here comes the tag…
Tag: tag
May 30th, 2006 at 2:12 am
I do believe that blogging is going to become very big in internet marketing, it does personalise a business and also it does at times seem a bit formal and once you get into the blog, it can seem as if you have known the author for a while.
Neil, I will surely like to be kept up to date in any new findings which will enable my blog to explode into a money churning business, I know thats one thing you are capable of doing, so ia going to a regular visitor on your blog.
Thanks for showing us newbies how to earn a decent living online.
Richard
May 31st, 2006 at 1:11 am
I understand the tag part of “tag and ping”. Basically by placing the Technorati.com category tag at the end of your blog post you have “tagged it”.
Where does the ping come in?
Is it automatic, ie…Technorati.com categorizing your post based on the “tag” (keyword) you assign results in a ping for each tag? Or does your blog post result in the “ping”? Or is that the secret ingredient, the missing information you can only find out when you buy the new “tag and ping” product being offered?
Just tagging the end of your blog post with Technorati.com’s tags seems too easy for all of the “hoopla” and “mega results” everyone is stating this new “tag and ping” traffic generation method gets. Not that easy is bad.
But, am I missing something?