My friend Larry Brauner wrote this in a comment on one of my social bookmarking articles the other day: “One of the challenges in bookmarking at some sites is choosing appropriate tags for other people’s articles. Then to make it even more challenging, some sites want comma delimited tags while others want space delimited, etc. Bookmarking other people’s content on multiple sites can be a bit of a pain.”
He brings up a good point, because tagging is of great importance in social bookmarking. If you want others to find your content and consider it relevant, choosing the right tags and submitting it in the proper format is essential.
In todays article I discuss the format you can use for your tags, so that it does not matter what requirements a specific site has. Regardless whether a site wants comma delimited or space delimited tags, you can submit in one and the same way to all.
It is important that you use tags that are as specific as you can for the content you are submitting. In other words, use 3 and even 4 keyword phrases as your tags. This creates the above painted problem. If tags are one word you would not have to worry about the format. One word tags look the same in any format. Commas and spaces are not an issue. However the, so called, long tail keywords describe the content usually much better.
For example, if I am submitting content with the title “6 ways to save on gas money”, your tag could look something like : ‘save on gas money’. In the comma delimited format you would simply put a comma after the last word of the tag and it would be clear that all 4 words are part of the one tag. However, in the space delimited format the 4 words would represent 4 tags of one word. This could have a significant impact on who is finding you and how relevant your content is to them.
To avoid this problem you can do the following. In stead of writing the words with spaces in between you can leave the spaces out and start each word with a capital. So, the long tail keyword phrase “save on gas money” would look like this: “saveOnGasMoney”. This is easy to read for your reader and the search engines recognize the words, knowing that when they see a capital it must be the start of a new word.
By following this system you don’t have to worry which format is used by what site. Since not all sites are very clear about what format they use, it can be a real time saver to simply follow the above suggestion.
Why don’t you try it out by bookmarking this post?
[audio:http://automarker.net/blog/audio/AMBlogIntro.mp3|autostart=yes]
