Why do we need tag?

Published by Dev team of TagALLY | Filed under technology

To get into a search engine, you used to just have a solid content, structure, and keyword development and manually submit your website to the search engines and then wait for them to come cruising through with their robots and spiders. Then came Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which brought with it a more focused attempt to page ranking with link exchanges and link popularity, followed closely behind by trackbacks, and pingbacks as a way to interconnect websites and blogs to promote popularity by link exchanges. Now, the hottest ticket in town appears to be tags.

Tags or tagging is the process of adding keywords which link directly to a site that monitors and allows search of key tags to find information on websites and blogs. Tag-related sites include Del.icio.us, Technorati, Flickr and now Wordpress 2.3 blogs.

Tags and tag-driven sites offer another way of finding, as well as connecting, information on the Internet. Think of tags as a form of interactive yellow pages. The tag link takes you to a collection of posts tagged with that tag category name.

For instance, instead of going to a search engine and typing in the keywords for Nature Photography, you would click on the Nature Photography tag on the site you are visiting, which would then display a categorized listing of posts about Nature Photography.

Tags on your site can have two functions.

Tags can link to related tag categories on Technorati or other tag sites, showing a collection of offsite posts from around the web all related to the tag category, such as Nature Photography.
Tags can link to a generated page such as your searchs do, listing all of the posts on your site related to that specific tag.
Tags can be linked from within the text, via a list at the bottom of your post, in a list in your sidebar or elsewhere on your site, or within a Tag Cloud or tag heat map. You can see examples of tag clouds and post lists of tags on my main site, Taking Your Camera on the Road, does. The tags on that site take advantage of both of the two options for use. One set will take you to another page on my site that lists posts related to that tag, and others will take you to the Technorati site for more content related to that same tag.