Jiglu is a Smarter Way to Tag Your Content

Tagging is one of those crucial areas that can make or break a site. Not only can it profoundly influence SEO but it can have even greater effects upon HOW people find your site as well as how deeply into your site they delve once they find it. In spite of these critical reasons why tagging should be a very high priority for anyone serious about content, tags are usually more of an afterthought; a thirty second exercise at the end of a blog post where you put a few terms related to what you just wrote add a few more that you always use and after checking that there are commas between each tag you call it a done deal.

This is hardly optimal and could mean that you’re practically giving away the farm or at the very least not allowing your work to shine to its potential. When was the last time you did a keyword analysis and determined a tag strategy based upon the terms that have most frequently driven visitors to your site? Or the words that result in your highest search engine placements? Do you even know what those words are? Don’t feel bad. Most people don’t. Either they don’t know any better or can’t be bothered. Blogging is hard enough without the heavy lifting of keyword/tag analysis.

If you’re someone that would love the boost in traffic that optimizing your tagging can deliver but without the mind numbing effort of sorting it all out then today is your lucky day. That’s because today Jiglu opens their beta.

Jiglu is the easiest way to effectively tag your site- every post you make is automatically analyzed by the Jiglu servers and with an algorithm that I’m assured by Jiglu CEO Nigel Cannings (with whom I spoke at length several days ago), is far from a simple text analysis tool, the terms that you use in a post as well as those that are most relevant from a keyword analysis standpoint become tags that are dynamically created by the Jiglu Widget.

Getting Jiglu is simple enough. There’s about a thirty second sign up process and then you get some code that once it is embedded in your site, will create your very own Jiglu tagging widget.

Provided the logic behind the widget and tag creation holds true - and I have no reason to believe that it won’t - I think this is likely to become a very popular application. It seems to me to have far more value than a Swiki tag cloud widget for instance.

That’s only half the equation though. It does little good to become wildly popular if you have no way to capitalize upon that popularity. Since I couldn’t see how this is an obvious money maker I did what all good stumped journalists do: I asked.

According to CEO Nigel Cannings, Jiglu actually has a couple of ways that it can produce revenue. One way, he claims is via the sale of aggregated data. It is true that when you have enough widgets creating tags on enough blogs you are going to get some very good trending information; information that is certainly worth a pretty penny to the right businesses.

The other key revenue producer will be the now nearly ubiquitous contextual advertising. It makes sense. The widget is doing the analysis and the reason that someone is on the site is most likely related to their interest in a particular tag. Thus, so long as whatever relates to that tag is both salable and happens to be an advertiser in Jiglu’s inventory it’s a match made in…well…blogdom I guess you’d call it.

After getting a grasp on the revenue model I suggested that they also think about using not just contextual ads in the sidebar but also turning the actual tags and keywords into textlink advertisements. I have a sneaking suspicion that in this instance they might just be very effective.

All in all I like this product a lot. I like the simplicity, I like the functionality and I like that it can save me time and improve (hopefully) my traffic and revenue. Although it still remains to be seen if Jiglu can really deliver on all these promises I’m looking forward to getting Jiglu installed on some Blognation blogs (mine in particular) so that we can give it a real world test and see for ourselves. When we have something along those lines to report we’ll be sure to let you know. Of course if any readers test this out and have results ahead of ours, by all means, don’t be shy, send me a note or comment here. I’m sure that people other than me are keen to see how this works too…