I'm not nearly as ticked about this product as I am about the
whole 500words garbage, but for $150 bucks???

I didn't think it was worth the $150 for you, so I'm going to
summarize it for you so you don't have to buy it.

I've been doing this in one form or another for months now,
so here's the summary of it:

Both technorati.com and icerocket.com actively look for tags
on blogs.  When they find tags on a blog, they will put a link
to that site on their site.  This page on their site is called a
"tag page" (example: http://technorati.com/tag/internet+marketing
is the tag page for "internet marketing").

An important part of this is to make sure your tags are in your
blogs rss feed.

'Tag and Ping' offers a few wordpress plugins that will do this,
one of which he doesn't like, the other which he improved on
doesn't work (well...it does, it's just dumb) and the last one
that works well.

The wordpress plugin is called simpletags and can be downloaded
here:

http://www.broobles.com/scripts/simpletags/

With simpletags all you have to do is add tags to your blog entries
like this:

[tags]tag and ping, rip-off, 500 words, garbage[tags]

and that’s it.  ‘Tag and Ping’ is 50% taken care of for you!

If you’re not using wordpress, you can do this manually.  In your
blog posts (or on any site for that matter) just put a link like this (or
multiple links like this):

<a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tags/your+tag+name” rel=”tag”>Your Tag Name</a>

As long as that makes it into the rss feed for the page (the wordpress
simpletags plugin will insert it for you) technorati and icerocket will pick
it up and will link to you from their site.

There are other sites out there that will also pick them up (using
the technorati url is fine, they’ll all pick it up if it has the “rel=’tag’”
part of the url) but technorati and ice rocket are the big ones right now.

You can see an example of this on my blog at:

http://www.jonasblog.com/2006/07/i-cant-take-it-anymore.html

At the bottom of that post are 3 tags that the simpletags module inserted
for me.  You can also see that it inserted them into my feed at:

http://www.jonasblog.com/feed

That’s the first half of tag and ping.

Sure, in the 112 page ebook there are pages and pages of explanation…
but I’ll spare you.

———————————————————————————————

The second half is about social bookmarking sites.  ‘Tag and Ping’
calls this your “Authority Site Network”…which is only partly true.

There are a bunch of sites that will allow you to
bookmark urls and then they’ll put the list onto a page for you.

On most of these sites spiders are allowed to find your
individual user page which has all the links on it.

Bookmarking sites:
http://del.icio.us
http://www.jots.com
http://www.furl.net
http://www.spurl.net
http://www.blinklist.com
http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com

Basically you set up an account with each of these (or, he suggests
setting up hundreds of accounts with each of them) and then adding
your sites to each account.

They will all create a user page for you which will display your links
and you get free links to your sites.

The theory behind it is great.

The reality is a little less than great.

I mean, the fact is that these links are from “authority sites” but not
from “authority pages”.  Your account page on any of these sites
isn’t really going to pull much weight.

Also, unless you do a ton of work, none of these account pages
are going to be relevant to any of your topics because each page
will be a mish-mash of content.  The page won’t have a topic.

This is basically worthless for Google.

If you can add your url to hundreds of accounts all at once on these
sites and most of them have a “popular tags” page that will
list the sites that have been tagged a lot most recently, but
those links aren’t permanent (or even close to permanent).

If you do get a link onto one of the “popular pages”, it’s likely
to only stay there for a few hours.  If google finds it, the link
will be gone when google comes back.

There are softwares to help you submit your sites to these
bookmarking sites easier.  ‘Tag and Ping’ lists a few of them,
tells you how to use them, and then tells you not to use them.
It has tons of screenshots and instructions and pages and pages
of garbage that you could have figured out yourself in about 12
seconds.

Basically, you can submit all your sites to del.icio.us using
‘delicioso’ which is available from download.com.

You can also import all your del.icio.us bookmarks into your
jots.com page (in your jots.com account go to the tools link) and
into your spurl.net page (click settings -> del.icio.us settings).

Each of these bookmarking sites also has an rss feed of
your bookmarks which you can submit to rss aggregator
sites.

The last thing ‘Tag and Ping’ tells you to do is use the ’sociable’
wordpress plugin to allow your visitors to bookmark your site
for you.

This may work if your blog is a normal real blog, but 98% of
the people who bought ‘Tag and Ping’ are just using splogs.

Give me a break!

Like anyone in their right mind is going to bookmark a splog post.

And that’s basically ‘Tag and Ping’.

There’s a very similar product available at www.taggingsecrets.com
and it’s only $47.

Obviously there’s a huge difference in the sales pages of these
two products but I don’t think the ‘Tag and ping’ sales page is $100
prettier than the taggingsecrets.com page.

The bottom line on this whole ‘tag and ping’ thing is that it’s free
and it’s pretty easy to do and that’s why I do it.

However, it’s also not going to be that effective.

Reasons why not:
1. Links from high PR pages are extremely temporary.
2. Links that are permanent are on very low PR pages.
3. Links from very few pages using this strategy are on targeted pages.

John