Yes. I know “tag and ping” sounds foolish, like a child’s game? So, get over it. Because today you are going to set up “tag and ping”.

Setting up Tag and Ping

Once you have completed your keyword research - and chosen those magical words about your website pages and contents, it is time for you to start tagging and pinging. AND, you can set up your blog to tag and ping your blog posts automatically.

WordPress is the best tool for tagging and pinging. And WordPress Themes are “tag and ping” friendly. Here is an overview on using tag and ping in WordPress:

1. Create your blog post.
2. Add relevant “tags” at the end of your blog post.
3. Publish your blog post.
4. Ping social bookmarking sites.
5. Because many of the social bookmarking sites are heavily spidered, your pages will be quickly spidered simply by being present in the index.
6. When you have finished, the social bookmarking sites will then crawl your blog post and index it under the tags that you have specified.

That’s the general overview, let’s reexamine in depth.(You can do it!!!)

Tags are simply links that have been formatted in such a way that the social bookmarking spiders can recognize them as tags. Whenever the social bookmarking sites see these tags, they immediately start crawling the content to index it on their site.

Technorati.com gives complete instructions on how to set up tags. The [tagname] can be any word, but it should be descriptive. Only use tags that are relevant to your content. You don’t need to include the brackets, just the descriptive keyword for your post. And make sure to include rel=”tag”. You can link to any web page that ends in a tag. In fact, if your blog supports categories, you can even link to your own blog. The social bookmarking sites will pick up and index your blog post even if you don’t link back to them. The key is simply knowing how to set this up. To do this, you will need to create tags for your blog.

Note: Any tag that is two words or longer should have a “+” symbol in between the words (e.g. love+connection). Never include spaces when creating tags.

For this example to work, you must create blog categories for each tag. Categories for this article could include “social bookmarking”, “tag and ping”, and “web 2.0″. For each of these categories that you have set up within your blog, you can automatically create the tag for them when you create your post - just by assigning that particular post to that category.

Once submitted, you will see a number of categories at the bottom of the post to indicate which categories your entry has been posted to. These are your “tags” and they will be indexed by any social bookmarking site that you add to your ping list. - - Your Ping List will be done on Monday’s installment of “Social Bookmarking.”

Running You Ragged,
Arthur Browning