Tagging For Traffic

Tagging for traffic is an experiment in the power of social media, and how it can best be deployed to help you reach your audience.

Social Media has become an integral part of our lives, and not just through Facebook or Twitter. Sites like Flickr, Youtube, Pinterest, Soundcloud are all social platforms that people use day-in and day-out to share photos or videos with friends and the world (or followers) at large. They’re fun places where we go to find new bands or watch a silly video without any personal commitment whatsoever.

And no matter where you go online, you’re bound to come across one person who is asking for shares on Facebook or Tweets on Twitter. The request is usually something like “Please share my video/photo/post with your followers.”

What many people don’t realize is that these online social networks are not just a means to an end, their popularity can be used as a way to promote one’s work. But how? By tagging.

Tagging used in this way is quite simple, and doesn’t require any specific strategy, so long as you know what tags are available and how they work.

Tagging is a way to mark up your content, to make it easier for people to view and share it. Every website and blog has its own tagging system, and each one can be customized to your needs. In the following, I will provide you with an explanation of how this works, as well as some examples of how you can use that information.

Facebook is a great place to experiment with different tags because they have so many available. You can also click the little camera icon on your posts (if you want) to add tags from other pages when sharing them online.

Facebook has over 800 different tags registered, and each one can be used to tag your posts. These tags can be used either on Facebook or on social media sites like Twitter, Flickr or Tumblr. The tags work a little differently on each platform, so I will go over the widest selection of options.

Here are a few examples of how you might use Facebook tagging to your benefit. One simple way is to tag any image that you feel will help boost its links with links back to your site with a relevant tag. On most sites, if the link is clicked it’s done in a separate window; however, if tagged it comes up directly in the browser and looks like this:

“http://www.yourdomain.com/image.jpg

Here’s an image of some fire trucks tagged with the tag “firetrucks”. What was once a boring photo of some fire trucks in the distance has now become a link that will take people right to this list of links for photographic fire trucks:

“http://www.carsoup.com/firetrucks-6-of-the-greatest-firetrucks-ever-built/”

You can build on the idea of tagging by subdividing your site into categories and using tags on each of them to help promote your content within each category or subcategory.

Conclusion

Tagging is a quick and easy way to promote your content. You’ll need to keep your eyes open for good content on Facebook; look around and take what you see as inspiration for your own site, making it easier to find and share.

There are a lot of ways to tag a page, from the name of the page itself, the names of images within that page or even more specific tags that you can think up. I recommend testing different tags until you find ones that work best for your audience.