Tuesday, August 8th, 2006...1:21 pm by Leroy Brown
A Beginner’s guide to Technorati
What is Technorati?
All good guides start here. Technorati indexes just about all the blogs on the planet - a daunting task if ever there was one. Basically they keep track of each and every post and link out there - so they know who’s posting, what they’re posting about, and even who is linking to who. There’s a Top 100 list with the 100 most linked-to blogs, so you can see the most popular blogs out there. You can even create a list of your favorite blogs to keep track of.
What can Technorati do for me?
Technorati can bring you traffic - and lots of it! Since traffic is the lifeblood of any blog, this is very important. Once you have everything set up properly, you can get highly targetted traffic to your blog - for free!
Great, how do I get started?
This is the best part - it’s so simple to get started with Technorati. First you sign up, and get a username and password. Once you’ve signed up and logged, you’ll see a box that says “Claim your blog.” Technorati offers a few different ways to verify that the blog you’re claiming is, in fact, yours. It just wouldn’t do to have people claiming other people’s blogs!
Tagging
Tagging is how Technorati knows how to index your posts. You can tag your posts manually by adding “rel=tag” at the end of your links. This is tedious and time-consuming. Fortunately, there are plugins for every major blogging platform out there that will make the process so simple you don’t even realize that you’re doing it. For Wordpress, I recommend Bunny’s Tags, since it’s what I use. Many people opt for Ultimate Tag Warrior, and I’m sure that’s a good choice as well.
Pinging
Pinging lets Technorati know that you have posted some new content on your blog - this is the most important part of all! If Technorati doesn’t know you’ve updated, then they won’t visit your site to update their records. That means no indexing, and no traffic! You can ping Technorati manually by visiting this link. Or if you’re lazy ( like me! ) simply visit Pingoat to ping a number of sites in one shot. Don’t overdo it though - Technorati will end up thinking you’re a spammer!
That’s about it guys. Technorati is a huge help for a blog starting off, and quite franky it’s nice to have with your established blog. Extra traffic never hurts anyone, and it’s nice to see how many other blogs link to you, and who’s doing it. How many of you are already using Technorati?
8 Comments
August 8th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
An easy to follow guide for beginners, about how to use Technorati for your benefit….
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August 9th, 2006 at 8:20 pm
I’ve yet to see much traffic come from technorati when compared to other sources, but I still tag every post I make and have WordPress ping them automatically on every update. Still, I do see occasional browsers come through from technorati.
Most interesting of all for me is to watch the gradual ranking increase as other blogs link to your site. I’d say I check it at least once or twice a week.
August 10th, 2006 at 5:01 am
I get a fair amount of traffic from Technorati - nothing earth - shattering, but nice to have. I get more with some tags, of course.
Good point about the links, - can’t believe I missed that! It’s very interesting, and quite exciting when you’re new.
August 10th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
This may seem like a dumb question. But am I correct in assuming that the “keyword tags” in Bunny’s Tags are not visible in the post when someone reads it? Or are they?
Thanks
August 10th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
Actually they are visible - on this site, they show in the box that lists the # of comments and the category.
If I knew of a way to add technorati tags without them being visible, that would be fantastic. Any ideas?
August 10th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
Ok, I see them now. But they don’t show up on the first page?
No I have no ideas right now but I am always looking for new stuff. If I find something about making the tags not visible I will let you know.
I have bookmarked your site.
August 10th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Big Roy,
You can have them show up on the first page, and there may be some benefits to doing that. I decided not to add them on the front page, because I hate clutter! Technorati indexes my posts just fine this way, so I’m happy with it.
I’m still trying to get the “Digg it” plugin to work, with no luck yet! Hopefully soon.
Thanks again for reading! When I started this site, I wasn’t sure if it would end up a success. I always had planned for this site since I started blogging, but I wanted to get some solid experience first, so I had something useful to offer.
August 21st, 2006 at 11:17 am
[...] You can read more about Technorati on my post Technorati for Beginners. [...]
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