Tagging

There were two significant early adopters in tagging. These are del.icio.us and furl.net. These sites make it possible for users to 'tag' any web page.

Del.icio.us describes itself as "a social bookmarks manager". Del.icio.us describe tags themselves as "one-word descriptors that you can assign to any bookmark." Furl.net doesn't define tags, but says it is "a free service that saves a personal copy of any page you find on the Web, and lets you find it again instantly by searching your archive of pages. It's your Personal Web."

Both sites do basically the same thing, allowing users to put a label on a webpage that they have visited, so that they can easily find it again. Users have the option of making their tags public or private (where only the person themselves can see what they have previously tagged) or they can share tagged site information with other individual members. Where the tags are public, other visitors can then see the tags that have been assigned to particular sites by users.

From the perspective of page design this becomes a useful way of summarising the content of a page, and developing the keyword cluster focus for the content of that page. Ideally the page design or CMS should be enabled to allow the administrator to tag pages with relevant keywords. These keywords can then act a primary search parameter for site searches, can be adjusted as the page changes, and act a search mechanism themselves through finding similar tagged pages. These specified tags should appear at the end of the content on the page as such:

“Tags: seo, sem, optimisation, search, organic search”