Sunday, November 26, 2006

New Tagging Sensation

The Internet, from its beginning to now, has always been a huge spawning ground for new and sensational ideas. Although these ideas usually come and go, many of them do indeed stick around for awhile. So what is all the hype on the Internet today? Tagging. Tags are relevant keywords related or connected to a piece of information such as an article, blog posting, or even a website.

In the early stages of the Internet, we had regular, plain ol' directories. Today, we have tagging websites. When submitting your website to a tagging directory, you will select the tags that you feel is relevant to your website and those tags will be used to describe your website. This is truly a revolutionary idea as more and more regular web users will be able to experience an increased user-friendly Web. They will also have the ability to find the information that they want to retrieve quickly and easily without having to rummage through irrelevant links.

Beyond the user experience, tagging can be greatly beneficial to search engine optimization. On tagging sites, the tags that you have selected would be relatively similar to the content on your website. It “categorizes” your website using those tags. Adding your sites to these tagging directories give your links that “human” touch that old-style directories lack. And doing all this tagging for your website is extremely simple and takes less than a minute.

More and more tagging directories are popping up all over the Internet – because they work. Many webmasters have already added directory tagging to their to-do list when they begin to link build for their own websites. A definite win-win situation for the webmaster and the users. It's a new thing that's catching on fast and becoming a big hit!

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking websites are becoming some of the hottest things in Web 2.0 today. If you are unfamiliar with what these social bookmarking websites do, then read on. Using these websites, you are able to store links that you like along with tagging them with relevant keywords to share with others -- social bookmarking.

So what exactly goes on at these websites?
Well, first of all, you are able to view what people are bookmarking and all of the links that they want to share with you. Of course, you could find these yourself using a search engine; but people are usually better than computers at suggesting what other people may like. That's the main beauty of social bookmarking right there.

Second, you are able to share your bookmarks with other people. If people see what you like, they may contribute similar things to help you out. This leads to more people sharing their bookmarks and before you know it, you are able to view a ton of cool and interesting stuff that you may probably not have seen if you were browsing the Web on your own.

Third, the searching. I'm sure you have used a search engine like Google or Yahoo before. Sure, they are great search engines but they lack the personal touch that social bookmarking sites provide. Humans are good at finding what humans may like. While searching on a social bookmarking site, you may find more things that are useful to you because the users are able to tag their bookmarks. This makes everything a lot more precise when searching.

And at last, the social part. Browsing these social bookmarking websites, it is astonishingly easy to find cool people with the same interests as you just by looking at the websites that they visit and bookmark. Social bookmarking websites are becoming very popular. With the high advancements in technology, it is only going to get better than ever.