A little late, but better late than never, I thought I’d post an answer to this question from the comments on my post about tagging for traffic:
Could you possibly explain this tag a little bit more? I thought it was just for blogs.
Yes, tagging is most often tied to blogs these days, but you don’t need a blog to use tags, you don’t need RSS or special pinging software. All you need is a site you want to promote and your web browser (and a few bookmarklets and toolbars for that web browser).
The sites I submit my pages to are most often referred to as social bookmarking sites. They seek to organize worthwhile pages on the Web based on user submitted tags or keywords, often called folksonomy as opposed to organizing the Web with a rigid taxonomy like Yahoo!’s directory does.
The social bookmarking sites I use most frequently are:
1) Del.icio.us
2) Furl
3) BlinkList
4) De.lirio.us
5) Yahoo MyWeb
If you wish to try this for yourself, sign up for each service and drag their ‘bookmarklet’ tool to your browser’s toolbar. In the case of Yahoo!, you’ll probably want to install the toolbar.
Once you’ve got the Yahoo! toolbar and the bookmarklets for the other sites plugged into your browser like you see in the picture above, you simply go to a page on your site — if it’s a content site, find a deep link to an interesting article — then click one of the bookmarklets. For each article you submit, enter a nice range of related keywords as tags, and whenever possible a really informal description of what the page is about.
I find it most effective to post article pages, primarily because you can focus on more keywords that way. Consider a site about yoga. You could submit the index page of a yoga site with tags like “yoga, meditation, yogi, exercise, etc”, with a description like: “This is a site about yoga with lots of articles.” Which is all fine and good . But now look at some interior pages and you’ll see why tagging specific articles is better. You might have one page tagged with “yoga, exercise, back pain, pain relief” and a description like, “Study finds that practicing yoga provides better back pain relief than massage, other exercises, or even drugs!” On another page you might have tags linking yoga and breast cancer, describing how practicing yoga helps breast cancer survivors recover. Another might have tags linking yoga and christianity. All of those deep links are far more interesting, and more far-reaching than ‘This is a yoga site” could ever be.
So, once you’ve picked the first article you want to submit, furl, blink and tag it on the various services, then move on to the next page and start the process all over again.
This has never failed to get traffic to my brand new sites. And while I can’t say for certain that it helps get my sites indexed faster in search engines, it certainly doesn’t hurt. I have also found that some sites aggregate and display results for certain keywords in Del.icio.us, and if you hit the right keywords, you’ll get some one way links from those sites that also drive traffic.
I usually don’t submit all the articles in a site — just the most interesting ones (in my opinion) — since I don’t like to spend a whole lot of time on stuff like this, but I’ve found that driving a bit of traffic can give me a good indication of the revenue I can expect from the site once indexed, and it feels good to have sites that make money from day 1.
I hope that answers the question. If you need to ask more, feel free to use the comments box. Comments are on full moderation because of spam, but I let all legit comments though… plus I don’t have rel=nofollow in my tags, so you’ll get the benefit of this site’s PR5 if you include your link.
