Viral Marketing: Tagging

Tagging is a great way of organizing content online and it has a viral community effect, much like here at Hubpages, each tag leads to a page of content created by others users or if you want you could try researching the tags that lead to an empty page and populate the page with content related to a single tag or a series of tags.

Folksonomies used to be the old word which was abbreviated from the words Folk and Taxonomy, whilst taxonomy still applies to some Drupal content management systems it still can be used, but tagging has come into it's own the past few years, especially if a site has categorized it's content and can relate categories to different tags, it makes it all the more better for search and viral tagging.

To file away content under tags is nothing new, what with labels and keywords the biggest thing to locate article content in search, but just think of the RSS feed capabilities, for all the possible tags you have your content under, of course there will be some slow burners as they will lead to empty content pages, but in the future these tags may start bringing in traffic as certain tag pages grow in content and relevance.

High traffic sites like Flickr and even here at Hubpages use the tagging system and just think of the viral effect of building back links on multiple sites like these, so that they can be found in the search engines, but also within the sites communities, any other image search engine and RSS feed aggregators. Bookmarking sites use this keyword tagging process to categorize content and make it accessible for search and on each individual site.

The viral nature of tagging has a knock on effect, the more relevant content that you write the more tags that content will relate to and the more possible windows into your own site through browser searches and clicking tags directly.

If we take a quick look at Flickr, I did a quick image search for the keyword tagging and that resulted in 1,783,665 results, although this keyword will bring up very unrelated results to the actual word, more like loose results, it just goes to show that when you tag something with a keyword tag and it will show up in an image search on Flickr and other online search engines if it's tagged correctly.

Blogs have a good way of tagging content with labels and categories to mark down what content category each blog post falls under and it makes it available to the wider community through tag clouds and tag lists and an obvious search box. And organizing content becomes much easier with tagging.

Viral marketing campaigns come into effect when you post highly relevant content that all leads back to your website or promotions, of course a structured plan of action should be used so that you don't appear like you are spamming each site, a mix of personal photos for instance could add some interest but also make it appear like you are a real person and not some spamming software robot intent on spamming people with dollar signs.

Look into sites that have the tag system, there are lots and see if they have communities, Squidoo, Hubpages and Blogger are the obvious ones, but look further a field for different types of tag sites, like social bookmarking sites too to add your bookmarks of your websites and web pages.

Good luck tagging and no spamming.