Adding Tags to your Blog posts, The Magic rel=”tag”

For those who don’t have a blogging tool that auto-magically adds tag’s the process can seem a bit bewildering, especially when there is so much to do.

We have come a long way since Folksonomies on Slashdot, and since the Beta of Blogger.com looks to include tagging (making my Technorati and del.icio.us Tags added with GreaseMonkey for Blogger.com users obsolete) it is worth a review.

The trick was a convention to add a attribute to the “common” hyperlink markup code too something like

. More details are on the MicroFormat Wiki under reltag, because the secret sauce is that rel=”tag”.

Remember that the url does not really matter! It could be del.icio.us, or technorati or YouTube, or even something internal to this site like Code.

The rel=”tag” is the microformat that tells any tag aware search engine that text in the anchour link is the tag lable. All tag aware search engines will eat the tagged links regardless of where its linking to. (see also Technorati’s help page on Tags)