What exactly is Tag and Ping?



You may have heard the term Blog and Ping before. That's a method which was a perfect way to get the search engine spiders coming to your site very quickly. I say was because it has become less effective than in the 2 years before.

The search engines do not value blogs that much anymore if they are pinging the blog directories extensively. But you can still get permanent links on these sites if you submit your site to their directories using a tool like my Blog Promoter.

Tagging is another, similar way to drive laser targeted traffic to a website. Basically, tagging means that you want your posts to appear on social bookmarking sites (sites to organize your bookmarks online) under certain keywords or categories aka Tags.

Apart from social bookmarking sites there are a kind of hybrid sites as they combine social bookmarking with blog posts. The most popular site in this category is Technorati.com. As these sites have thousands of regular visitors looking for regularly updated content, it is a much faster way to get traffic to your website than waiting to get listed in the search engines.

What are the benefits of Tag and Ping?

- it's free

- nnot too complicated

- you don't have to buy additional software to do it

- you can get high PR backlinks to your website

- almost immediate traffic to your site

Unfortunately, some spammers have been using these techniques to such an extent that several social bookmarking sites had to take countermeasures to protect their integrity.

Conclusion

It's important that you don't use this method in an unethical manner like Sean Wu suggested in his ebook (by creating multiple profiles on these sites and use their voting system to make your site appear more popular).

This would destroy the effectiveness of that method. But used ethically, Tag and Ping and the use of social bookmarking sites in general is a great long-term strategy and will enable you to achieve permanent and long term exposure for your all of your websites and blogs if you're playing by the rules. Then this method will continue to work and bring your sites many advantages.

And not to forget, you'll get permanent backlinks from authority sites even if not all of them will help you with your link popularity as some bookmarking sites have added a no follow tag to all of their pages. This means that the search engines won't follow the link to your site and it won't help you in your rankings.