Technorati and What It Can Do For You
Techno Who!?
This is the response I usually get from my clients when I suggest that they need to link their blog to Technorati.
But, if you have a blog, or you are thinking of adding one to an existing website, Technorati, the largest blog search engine is definately a site you’ll want to romance with. This specialized search engine is devoted entirely to searching through blogs, and lately, it has started to seriously compete with search engine giants such as Google and Yahoo.
So, What Does Technorati Do?
Essentially, Technorati can index your blogs, whether they are about cooking, financing, engineering or entertainment. The name itself is based on a joining of the words technology and literati, the later referring to a group of critical intellectuals (I didn’t feature in the latter group!). By tagging Technorati throughout your post e.g. this post is about commercial financing, you’ll keep your posts at or near the top of the list at Technorati.
What is a Tag?
Tags are simple category names that enable people to categorize their posts, photos and videos so that it makes sense to your online visitors. Anyone with a blog can contribute to Technorati Tag pages and if your blog software supports categories and RSS/Atom feeds (like Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, Blogware), all you need do is create your categories as usual and make sure you are publishing RSS/Atom feeds and your categories will be read as tags.
You then want to ensure that your blog software is configured to ping Technorati by ensuring it is listing in your “update services” if you are using WordPress so that as soon as you publish your blog post, Technorati will be pinged automatically.
I’m sure your next question is how can Technorati benefit my business?
At the most basic, you’ll find that Technorati is one more way to let the people looking for your service find you. When people search using Technorati, they are searching for information that has a personal bent to it, and has a presentation that they find easy to read. In other words, people who search Technorati are looking for good information, and if they can find you and you can provide that information they are looking for, you will be one giant step closer to getting a customer, client or subscriber.
Although Technocrati has been criticized for not taking into account the 56 million blogs on MySpace, you’ll find that it can still be quite useful to you and has some attractive search engine benefits particularly when you get ranked at or near the top.
Until next time,
Why You Need Regular Blog Posts
I know my clients must be fed up of hearing this, but I thought that if people understood just a little about how blogs work, it would encourage them to write more regular blog posts.
I took the view that if I just tell my daugther that she is not to do something or that she should do something, the response is often negative. If I explain to her why it’s in her best interest to do or not to do something, her response is always higher.
So, this is just a quick tip, but I hope you gain some value from it …
This is what happens when you blog:
Once you publish your blog, a ‘ping’ message is sent to the blog update services telling them that your site has been updated. Search engines like Google as well as RSS specific services like, Technorati, and Feedster periodically asks the Update Services – sometimes referred to as Aggregation Ping Servers - to let them know which sites have been updated. The search engine spiders can then visit your blog to find out if there is any relevant content and if there is, they will index your site.
But, you don’t have to rely on the Update Services to notify the search engines that you’ve updated your blog, just by adding fresh new content on a regular basis, you will attract the search engine spiders. Perhaps in a later post I’ll go through the nitty gritty of how this happens. For now, I want you to think of the pinging services like this …
Whenever you publish your blog post, a bell rings at a “messenger’s” house. The “messengers” job is simply to tell the regular callers (the search engines) who they should consider visiting on their next round. And, it could be YOU! 
Now I suppose you want to know how to ensure the Update Services are being pinged from your blog? Well first of all, ensure the “Allow Pings” is selected in the “discussion” tab on the right of your blog post writing area and then you need to go to “Options” and then “writing” sub tab to ensure you have a list of the most up-to-date ping or update services in that box. If not, click on one of the links above and find out more about where you can get a list of these.
Hope this quick tip was useful.
RSS for Information Publishers
If you want to read about RSS and how it benefits to blog and website readers, you can check out my last blog post entitled “What is RSS?”
Today though, I want to give some focus to the benefits of publishing a RSS Feed if you are the owner of a website or blog.
But Why Syndicate your Content?
In essence, if you are an online publisher and you don’t publish a RSS feed or syndicate content, you’re missing out on potential free new readers. Feed syndication is a simple and low cost way to get your name and your content in front of new readers and automatically keep existing readers updated.
Syndicated content includes not just the headlines to your most recent articles, but can include photos, videos, podcasts, news updates and, almost anything else that gets updated regularly. So after taking the time to create the content, why wouldn’t you want to broadcast that information to as wide an audience as possible?
And, with all the issues that email delivery presents these days, RSS also provides an excellent method for getting your message delivered without being blocked by your subscriber’s ISP and, there is no need to concern yourself over “Can Spam” laws. The thing I love most about publishing my content via RSS is that my subscibers receive my information because they’ve asked for it.
Since I use double optins for my newsletters, my suggesting that subscribers didn’t ask to receive information from me might sound strange but in my experience, if you offer a free report, audio download or, as Alex Mandossian would call them, “ethical bribes” to encourage people to sign up for your newsletter or blog updates, you’ll get people unsbuscribing on the grounds that they never requested the information in the first place. What the heck … they’ve got your freebie and now they never want to hear from you again.
There are arguements for and against offering “ethical bribes” but the point I want to make is that with RSS is 100% permission based, and your subscribers can access your message when they want it, how they want it and delivery is 100% guaranteed since your message isn’t going to be filtered out or blocked by an ISP.
How to Publish RSS Feeds?
There are various ways to add a RSS Feed to your site including the addition of javascript or PHP code or, by using third party services such as FeedForAll.
The drawback with using javascript is that the content of the feed isn’t recognised by the search engine spiders and therefore, it won’t be indexed. Using PHP however to display your feed is a little more complex but the feed is considered search engine spider and robot-friendly and, it always displays the most current information from the RSS feed and the web page content .
It isn’t uncommon for people to use third party services to display their feed but because these services operate on a different domain server there is an arguement that there is little benefit to end-users by displaying their feeds in this way and, there is always the risk of losing your feeds should the third party system fail for whatever reason.
So, with all of that said, by far the easiest way to publish a RSS feed, is to publish a blog.
Depending on the platform you have used to create your blog, your feed will be published automatically and because a blog usually benefits from freshly updated and relevant content, they are liked by the search engines.
Managing your feed
Once you’ve either built your blog or added a RSS Feed to your site, my suggestion is that you use Feedburner, a popular service (now owned by Google) and used by many online publishers to publish an existing feed.
The advantages to using Feedburner is that they will enable you to:
- Publicize your content and make it easy for people to subscribe.
- Optimize distribution of your feed so that your content is properly formatted for all of the major directories and so the content can be consumed by subscribers wherever they are.
- Analyze your traffic to learn how many subscribers you have, where they’re coming from and what they like best.
There is plenty more that could be said about publishing a RSS Feed, but I hope that from this post, you’ve at least gleaned the major benefit of “Content Distribution” when RSS is used effectively.
The wider the distribution of your feed, the higher your chances of getting targeted traffic to your site and combined with higher search engine rankings you have a near perfect recipe for bigger profits.
Until next time,
What is RSS?
What is RSS? First off, some quick stats … Did you know that according to Marketing Sherpa, in February 2006, there were are at least 75 million consumers and business personnel in the USA and UK who use RSS on a regular basis?
But, depending on which study’s stats you believe, only 17%-32% of RSS users actually know they’re using RSS! That means that roughly 50 million regular RSS users would say, “Huh?” if asked “what does RSS mean?”
After reading this, I decided it was time to at least educate my readers and, I’m going to try and answer the question using easy to understand concepts.
What does the acronym RSS stand for?
RSS (sometimes called RSS Feeds, XML, Atom Feeds or Channels) stands for “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”, and, the easist way to get some understanding of how RSS works is to consider what happens when you subscribe to either a magazine or newspaper. If you subscribe to a magazine or newspaper either online or via your local newsagents, you don’t need to physically go and collect your copy each week - they will deliver it to your door.
In the same way when you subscribe to a blog or a website, you’ll receive automatic updates so you don’t have to remember to visit the site or, spend time going back to the site to check whether they have published any new content. This means you can easily stay informed about what is going on online by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are most interested in.
How do you sign up to a website or blog via RSS?
You may recognize the icons below from sites you’ve visited and probably wondered what on earth they are. These icons indicate that the site owner is offering you the option of receiving their syndicated content in a format that can be read using what is called an RSS reader also known as an aggregator, that displays RSS or syndicatated feed content from web sites you are subscribed to.
These are just two of the RSS icon that most people recognise:
There are plenty of other icons in use today though, I have noticed that “square” icons seem to have gone out with Web 1.0 if you want to call it that. In the main, the icons now have rounded corners and come in various shapes and sizes, but in the main the symbol remains the same.
What about RSS Readers?
If you want to be able to read syndicated content from websites or blogs, you’ll need a RSS reader or aggregator which will allow you to read the syndicated content from the sites that you have subscribed to.
Here are a few Feed Reader icons that you may recognise:
I personally use the Google reader since it’s free and easy to use. There are also paid services such as FeedDemon, but I would suggest as a start that check out the Google reader.
Whichever RSS Feed Reader you use, it will automatically notify you when new content has been published at any of the sites you’ve subscribed to. To read the content of the RSS feed, all you have to do is click the link – which is usually limited to the headline and a brief description of the newly published content – and you’ll be taken to a new content page associated with the website where you can read the full story.
Sometimes the website publisher will only publish part of the feed content to force you to visit their site, but I’ve personally noticed that my subscriptions increases somewhat when I opt for publishing the full feed.
There is a lot more that can be said about RSS Feeds, readers etc but understanding what RSS is really will help you understand why RSS is so important to you if you are an online publisher.
In the next post, I’m actually going to discuss this more but the meantime, check out this video which will give you the “low down” on RSS in plain English …
