“Tagging” posts is one of the hottest current ways to be connected to other content and to be noticed. But you don’t have to have an application to tag posts for Technorati: here’s how you can do it ‘by hand’.”

If you design, chances are you blog. It’s fun, increasingly easy, free, and therefore a low-(or no-added-)cost way of self-promotion. It gives the designer a chance to hone their expertise, polish their writing (something all too few designers have a handle on is communication through the written word, and it’s powerful) and do a sort of public research and share and attract like minds.

What Tags Do

These days, one of the fashionable ways to connect to community is through tags. Tags are sort of like keyword categories and live at the end of your blog posts, and are addressed by services such as [1] Technorati. In this case, if one writes a post and decides that good keywords to describe the content are “design”, “illustration”, and “print”, each of these words can be indexed by Technorati by those keywords. anyone can go to Technorati, keyword-search for “design”, and any blog post you have tagged with that word will pop up–along with a whole lot of others, naturally.

There is an art and style to tagging, but that’s not what we’re going to concentrate on here–what follows is the nuts and bolts.

A Technorati Tag

The Technorati tag looks like this:

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/tagnam” rel=”tag”>tagnam</a>

The trick here is to replace each instance of tagnam with your keyword. If I tagged a post “design” for listing on Technorati, then, it would look like this:

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/design” rel=”tag”>design</a>

A post thus tagged will appear–along with all others so tagged–at the URL http://www.technorati.com/tag/design. Clicking on the linked word in the posting will take the surfer directly to this URL, which lists this and all other posts so tagged.

The Tag List

How many times have you seen the following at the bottom of a blog post:

From above, we know if this was a real tag list, clicking on each of the words in the list would take us to a Technorati page listing posts for each keyword. This is also easy to accomplish. Recall that our examples were “design”, “Illustration”, and “print”. The tags would, respectively, look as follows:

• <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/design” rel=”tag”>design</a>
• <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/illustration” rel=”tag”>illustration</a>
• <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/print” rel=”tag”>print</a>

Now, if included at the end of the post with no other glyphs or punctuation, the words would show up thusly: designillustrationprint with no explanation. Adding the rest is easy; this is actually elementary HTML. All it takes is a comma and space between the tags and the string “Technorati Tags:” just before this string of tags, Thusly:

Technorati Tags: <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/design” rel=”tag”>design</a>, <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/illustration” rel=”tag”>illustration</a>, <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/print” rel=”tag”>print</a>

Which will produce the following in the browser:

Technorati Tags:[2] design, [3] illustration, [4] print

The above tags are active links. Click each and see what happens. This is connecting in action, and why design bloggers owe it to themselves to used tags.

What next?

The next step is to ping Technorati to index your blog. There is a [5] manual ping page here, and many blogging apps support automatic pinging. Some popular services, most notably Blogger, however, do not, and it’s suggested that the avid tagging blogger bookmark the page for easy reference.

After a short time, your post will be included in any keyword listing.

Seems a lot of work…

Tagging seems to involve a lot of HTML coding. While there is much of that to do, there are shortcuts. Once again, however, while Blogger does allow embedding of tags, the Blogger-based blog owner has to make the tags up themselves. There are assists to do this (watch for an upcoming Freeware Friday for a Firefox-based bookmarklet that will be mad assistance) but it never hurts one to learn from the ground up on such things. One possible thing is to have a macro–either software-supported or a text clipping of some variety–that can be cut and pasted into the blog posting. It’s standard HTML, and easily repeatable.

Once you have Technorati linking your posts to others on the same subject, given the amount of self-promotion this can enable, it won’t seem all that much work.

Lastly, a couple of general hints

• Keep your tag words descriptive and appropriate to the post. This will enhance the post’s ability to be listed with other appropriate posts under the same tag.
• Two-word tags require a plus-sign to link together. If, instead of “Adobe” and “InDesign” you wanted the link to be “Adobe InDesign”, the tag would look like this: <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/Adobe+InDesign” rel=”tag”>Adobe InDesign</a>. The link will show up in the tag list without the plus sign; there will be a space between the words in the compound term

It’s worth it to foster a little connectivity. Tag! You’re it!