Importance of Tags in Social Bookmarking

Everyone aware of what’s social bookmarking is and we are not getting deep into that. Simply put. Social Bookmarking is sharing your pages and sites online with your friends and peers. This strategy has worked quite few wonders and you can find many successful stories , getting traffic and visitors to the site. A quick search in Google for “Social Bookmarking” can reveal you many things you might have known and what it can do for your website.

Do Tag it:

As said, social bookmarking is one of the best ways to bring more traffic and new visitors to your site and make your site visible, to a larger audience, it is of no worth if you don’t use the power of bookmarking effectively. Needless to say, one of the important things in social bookmarking is “Tags”. Tags are short generic words which describes the page you are bookmarking. Needless to say, these tags play an important role in social bookmarking and increasing your site’s visibility to users. Simply put,tags are similar to keywords for your site for which you would like your visitors should come and also for which you can produce the content in the site.

Why should you tag it properly?

I have personally seen many sites which are not so relevant for what I searched for. This can make the reputation of your sites to go lower which may not make the visitors to return often or refer to someone else. It is so important to use the full potential of social bookmarking and therefore more impotant to use the tags properly. The following points says what are the importance of tags in social bookmarking and why should you concentrate more on it.

Faster Searching and found for more queries:

The first and very basic thing, why we should use tags in effective way is, it helps us to be found in the results of what users search for.

For example, if someone searches for ” Best cars of 2009″ and if you have tagged your page with “best” “cars” “best cars” “best 2009 cars” etc.., that makes the people to find you easier which in turn increases your visitors.

Acts as a External Meta Data:

Most People and every Webmaster knows what meta data is. For those who don’t know,, Wikipedia explains Metadata as

“Metadata (meta data, or sometimes metainformation) is “data about data”, of any sort in any media”

It is the data that explains what you give in the site, such as title, keywords and description of your site’s content. Tags act as External Meta data. That is, you might have not known that this may be included in the keywords you target but the readers who bookmark this can give you a better information for your content. For example,

Lets say you have a site for selling cars and you have decided to give the meta data or keywords for the page as latest cars and brand new cars. But someone who saw the site has found the site has prices for the cars cheaper than any other places. So, he/she might have tagged this site for “Low Price Cars”. This can act as additional information for your site which is not given by you.

Having more metadata for the page can again help you to appear in search results which in turn can increase the traffic just like the previous point said.

Use Relevant Tags:

So, you have known that having tags more can help you to appear in search results and people can find your site easier. But People often think they can have more tags with the site, in a way to get in the search results. But thats not a right thing. As the definition for Tags as already stated, it is “A short and generic word ‘describing’ your content”. So we should try to tag out sites as relevant as possible.

Having irrevelant tags can give a negative reputation to your site as well as your future bookmarking will be nor so effective.

Categorisation:

You may be aware of every bookmarking site has some categories in which you can make related people come to your site. But another fact is there are people like me who look for the most used tags or the tags that impress me more. Hence it is clear that Tags are another way to group the sites and having Tagged as well as tagging by relevant most used tags can increase the visitors.

Trending Tags:

As said in the previous point Tags are grouping our pages together. And its always better to use the most used tags or the Trending tags of the social bookmarking site. May be there will be no things called Trending Tags or similar to it in Bookmarking sites but you can always try to go with the most used tags as it can make you visible to more people and also make sure they are relevant.

Co Citation:

This is similar to categorization, the only difference is it involves search engines and their peers instead of people. As social bookmarking categorise the sites with tags it also helps the search engines to classify the site according to it. This makes the effort of search engines going through it and finding what the stuff is. Instead the indexing and classification of search engines can improve by categorising on the tag basis and that makes to help you to appear in SERP for the tags used.

Hence said, tags are the most important thing in Social Bookmarking.

Tags help to categorise posts, increase the chances of to be found in search results and also acts as external metadata. So tagging websites properly can surely enhance your users and increase the traffic.