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,