Blogging is a powerful tool. Whether you are using your blog for personal use, as a business or as a SEO tool, you can increase traffic through proper use of tagging. Tags are user generated descriptions of content. Unlike meta tags, user generated tags are followed by google because in the tag list, each tag is a link to other articles that use the same tag.

This brings us to how you should be tagging. Each article you write should have several tags. The tag is not just an alternate title, but also specific interesting parts of the article. Think about the kinds things both people and search engine bots look for. Be specific, but also try and choose tags that overlap. That is, use the same tags on related articles so if readers want to find more on the same topics they can find them easily. A good piece of advice is to try and make the tags as search engine friendly as possible without sacrificing the readability of the site.

Tagging is most visible in the Tag Could. Tag clouds show most used tags visually by the size of the font. First invented by Flickr, tag clouds are a quick way for users of your site to see what your site really talks about. Tag clouds are also very useful because they work to build quick internal links. Each tag in the could is a link to a page containing articles on that subject. Therefore, by simply using tags properly you have a robust internal linking system ideal for internet marketing.

If you have a Wordpress site, you can also use categories, which is like tagging. Wordpress will save your categories, so it is easy to add a new blog article to a category, or add new ones. Search engines trust tags more than meta data and the like because they consider them to be user-generated, and therefore more trustworthy.