Update on Tag and Ping

Since buying Sean Wu's Tag & Ping a few weeks ago I've now had time to evaluate Sean's techniques. Here's what I've found:

• all of the sites I've been promoting have improved in rankings
• all sites have received direct traffic from the "tag" pages
• some of the personal bookmark pages I've created have shown up for searches on specific keywords

There's no doubt that Sean's methods are effective but you do need to use caution. Sean advocates creating multiple accounts (as in hundreds) with each bookmarking service. This troubles me, and frankly I don't advise it. It amounts to abusing these services and that's something we don't want to do. The thing is, you don't have to, because in fact there are many bookmarking services out there. I actually found over 80 even though Sean only mentions 4 in the book. Some of the admins from these sites are VERY sensitive to what they see as spam. On one site I found (Feedmarker) my IP was banned after posting just a few bookmarks to a single account. Exactly what they objected to I don't know (possibly ANY commercial site), but there are many others you can happily post dozens of sites to without a problem.

My advice? Don't create more than 2 or 3 accounts per bookmarking site and don't use software to post hundreds of urls at a time. Use these services responsibly and for the purpose they were intended. Here's a few more tips for using Tag & Ping:

• create a themed page at a social bookmarking site by bookmarking your site plus other, non-competing, resource sites (e.g govt). Add about 8 sites, with yours at the top, which targets a specific keywords phrase. Because you are creating this page on an existing authority site you have a good chance of it ranking well for your keywords. This not only creates a link to your site but generates direct traffic as well.
• open an account at flickr, create and upload a photo set related to your site. Name your photos using your targeted keywords and create links to your site in the photo descriptions. Just like the themed page above, a photo collection page can rank well for your targeted keywords as well as create backlinks to your site.

I still think Sean's book is too expensive, but that's countered by the fact that he provides lots of free bonuses including a membership site which you get lifetime free access to. So in the end, the value is there. Another book I recommend you check out is Tagging Secrets.

Steve

Keywords: tags social bookmarking create backlinks tag ping