del.icio.us URL History an Excellent Tool
del.icio.us has launched a rather useful URL history tool which highlights who has bookmarked sites in the past and which tags were used. The tool is extremely useful for tracking how users associate or define your site and how popular that site may be among del.icio.us users.
For example, when tracking the URL history for SearchEngineJournal.com del.icio.us shows that over 181 people have tagged the site in the past, with tags and descriptions ranging from expected keywords to descriptions of the site being “fair and balanced” or “the Search engine Blog – the people that are in the SE know.”
For the most part the tags are positive and its interesting to see that some bookmarks label the site as being “Search Engine Optimization news” or “Blog Search”, such info gives me a better idea of how readers view this site. Speaking of SEO, this tool is extremely useful for picking up keywords which a site owner may not have thought for optimizing for or terms which fall outside of industry jargon; example tummy tuck vs. abdominoplasty or Mickey D’s vs. McDonalds. In this manner, tagging is a great way to get into the mind of the consumer, and then connecting with their thought process.
Beautiful part about monitoring tags for useful keywords is that when using this tool, one is not limited to digging into the tagging history of their own site – it is incredible for competitive intelligence.
