I’ve been schooling myself on tags recently. Specifically I’ve been working with Ultimate Tag Warrior, which is a pain and yet one of the best plugins available. Tagging done properly works so well. I was able to get a new site built last Saturday and indexed, not just spidered, by Google on Wednesday. Here’s how:

I went to my favorite keyword research site, NicheBot and got to work. I was able to find a keyword phrase in my niche that got tons of daily traffic and had little competition. This phrase was perfect and I was able to purchase the .com for it.

I built a WordPress blog, found a great SEO’d theme and activated some of my favorite plugins like UTW, Akismet, Smart Update Pinger and Optiniche. Made URL-friendly links with permalink. You know, the typical stuff.

Then I posted twice a day. Using UTW in conjunction with NicheBot keyword phrases, I used tags that were search friendly. High demand and low competition. Within two days I was getting a trickle of traffic from Technorati from those tags.

I am now so very careful about how I tag. I love tags. With search engines you are at the mercy of the algorithms on how they view your post and what keywords they choose to rank you with. You can try to play with keyword density but it is such a pain. With tags I specifically tell Technorati and others what I think my post is about. If I tag it for blue cars and you search Technorati for blue cars, my blog will be there. Good luck with that on Google.

And also if you use search terms with high demand and low competition as your tags, your blog will stay higher up on Technorati’s search listing longer for that tag. Huh? Let’s say you go to NicheBot and find that the phrase “clinical applications support” is searched for over a 100 times a day, yet the competition results only show 3 sites. It’s a good term to write a post about and use for tags. You post, tag and ping. Go to Technorati after, say an hour, and search for “clinical applications support”. You’ll be listed top 3, easy. OK, go back in three days. A week. Maybe a month even. For something that specific, as long as no one else has discovered your niche and started tagging about it, you’re listing will be the one people find when they search for it. And don’t think that Google won’t eventually take notice. It may come up in the Google results.

I also posted my blog on Delicious. I Blinked it. I Spurled it. Standard social bookmarking. After I get a few more posts I’ll start trading links.

So where was I listed after all this on Wednesday? #2 for my primary search term. Monetization will come in a few weeks after I get it accepted in some blog directories and by other blog owners.

Tag and ping done right, can do you right. As long as you sprinkle in careful keyword research.

And what’s sad? Lost Ball is not optimized for tags and keyword phrases as I detailed above…yet.