Blog Clue
Tag
In blogs? and blogging? tags and tagging? are a way of using a micro format? built in to HTML? to allow indexing of content.
What it should mean to you is that by a well placed hyper link you can mark your content as belonging to one or more categories. The hyper link acts as a way to share and inform o the nature of the category so that readers know what you re talking about and the the extra rel="tag" inside link show search engines that the link is a tag.
When choosing a target for linking to you should make some effort to choose links that
- Follow the standard
- Are authoritative on the subject in a way that relates to you
A tag can be created very easily assuming you know how to make a hyperlink in HTML.
a normal hyper link might look something like this:
<a href="http://blogclue.com">blog clue</a>
to qualify as a tag the hyper link must end "/TagWord" and have link text that is the same. It must also have the rel="tag" attribute.
<a href="http://blogclue.com/tag/fun" rel="tag">fun</a>
One lesser used effect is that you can link keywords in the blog post to more information and tag the post in one move. In this way you are serving you readers better content and categorising you post so other readers can find it all in one go. You also save space at the end of the post because a list is not needed.
Tag Spam
Google is extremely sensitive on issues of spam and dislikes links that seem to be trying to game the system. As such if you add a lot of tags to your post you may be well advised to "mix up" your tag links to choose different targets.
Tag Noise
Some tags are applied badly or pointlessly (spammy even) and some posts are tagged with unrelated words. This is known as noise. When only a few people apply tags to something or when only a few items have been tagged the result is not representative of the whole and can give a very distorted picture.
When the number of people tagging and the number of things tagged increases it becomes easier to understand the bigger picture as the noise is reduced to a tiny fraction of the total and can easily be ignored.
Tag friendly sites
This list is likely to get long very quickly as more people edit it so a little common sense is needed when adding to the list. microformats.org have a page dedicated to this subject but it is rather limited.
- Blog Clue tag pages make fine tags
- wikipedia pages mostly work
- Most media wiki implementations work well
- works well but multiple words must be separated with an underscore
- Technorati? tag result pages work well for most words. Multiple words are separated with a "-" or a "+"
- ebay? search pages can be used
- Lord Matt?'s fact-o-page works and has free copy and paste code
- My Blog Log? can be used as they have an internal tagging system
http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/tags/followed by the tag word but only where the tag already exists.
