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.
