The tag and ping concept has its roots in the social bookmarking explosion. More of these sites are being created every day, taking some of the market share away from search engines. The key difference is that social bookmarking sites organize their listings based on the votes of actual people while search engines organize their information automatically according to their own algorithm.



The first step is to sign up for a Technorati account, of course. Next, you need to login to your profile and claim your blog. After entering the blog URL, Technorati will verify that you are the blog's real owner. They currently have two methods of doing this. You can place a small bit of code somewhere on your blog's home page or simply input your blog login and password. (Because of privacy concerns, Technorati claims that they do not store this information anywhere.)

Once you've claimed your blog, you can set up your profile information, with a customized description and up to 20 tags of your choice. Your blog will be listed when people search for these tags. Like any search engine, you'll probably be listed lower for the more competitive phrases until you get several incoming links for those keywords.

As you're writing your blog posts, think about which keywords you would like to ?tag? on that page. One of the major differences between tagging and regular SEO is that you can tag several keywords on the same page. Unlike search engines, social bookmarking sites will list your page under different keyword topics.

The goal of these social types of sites is to help surfers find quality sites that are relevant to their search terms, so you can get listed under many different tags. The tag word itself does not have to be used on the page, but you should try to stick with related terms so you don't get flagged for spamming.

Now you need to add tags to your blog posts. Wordpress has a few useful plugins to help with the tag code and there is similar code available for Blogger as well. With the Wordpress plugin, you can add [tags]keyword, keyword[/tags] while you're writing the post and you'll get a list of tags at the bottom. You can also add the [tag] code to words inside your post and they will be added to the list of tags.

When publishing your posts, make sure Technorati is in your ping list and your posts will be automatically be listed under the tags you selected. When surfers search for those keywords, your blog will be listed in the results. If they like your blog, they can vote for it and increase its popularity. Try to focus your tags on the tightest niches possible to get the most narrowly targeted traffic.

As new alternatives to search engine traffic appear, they create new opportunities for clever marketers. Technorati is just one of the vast numbers of social bookmarking sites that have been launched in the past year. Keeping current with these new marketing avenues will help you stay a step ahead of your competitors.