The AOL Community Info Blog

The Magic Smoke Blog Editor Joe says it best:

"Tags -- If you've ever used a social sharing site like Flickr (for photos) or del.icio.us (for links), you'll know what I'm talking about: it's the ability to label content (your own or someone else's) with descriptive tags."

Once a word or phrase is tagged, it is added to a tag search engine's tag index. Users who utilize the tag search engine are then able to search the blogosphere for entries that are tagged with a particular word or phrase.

For example, let's say I created a blog entry about Tiger Woods' performance at the Masters PGA Golf Tournament. Since I know "Tiger Woods" and "Masters Tournament" are probable tag search words, I would tag them with an HTML code.

Once the words are tagged with the code, anyone who uses a tag search engine will be able to find my entry.  The free service I use to tag entries is Technorati. There are others out there, but Technorati is by far the coolest.

In order to tag Tiger Woods with the Technorati service, I insert the following HTML code in my entry:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tiger+woods" rel="tag">Tiger Woods</a>

(Don't forget to make sure you are in "View as HTML" mode in the blog entry window.)

It will add a minute or so to your blog entry creation time, but you should see an increase in traffic to your blog as more people use tag search engines like Technorati.

Here are some other resources to get you started:

-- Magic Smoke: Intro on Tagging, More on Tagging From the Journals Team, Please Play With This: Tagging Beta

-- Member Help: Blog Message Boards

-- Start Now: Create a Journal

Tags: Tag, AOL Blog

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this