Do You Know About Technorati?

Fellow Allbusiness blogger, Denise Wakeman, left a comment on a recent post saying, "I'd like to see a tutorial on the mechanics of Technorati and putting tags in your posts." Denise, your wish is my command.

In the way of introducing you to the site, another Allbusiness.com blogger John Jantsch made the comment in a recent post, "Technorati keeps track of what is being said about what and whom in the blog world and it can be a great way to find out who in linking to your blog and talking about your blog as well as finding related blogs."

If you are unfamiliar with Technorati, let me encourage you to take advantage of the benefits associated with a site that I believe is as important as Google, particularly where blogs are concerned. Let me attempt to explain some of its inner-workings.

According to the about us page, Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere - the world of weblogs. It chronicles what it calls the "world live web." Technorati is a sort of "what's happening now" in that it tracks almost in real-time what's being said on the web via blogs at a given moment.

The site uses an indexing mechanism called tags. You can think of a tag as a category name. In fact, Technorati looks at categories on blogs as tags and indexes accordingly. That's why it's very important to give thought to the keywords used in naming your categories.

I tell my clients to think of terms that readers might use when doing a search, and name your categories accordingly. Technorati suggests category names be descriptive and topically-relevant. Categories that are esoteric have less meaning to the reader and, as such, to the search engine.

If you use a blog platform that doesn't support categories, like Blogger for example, you can work around that deficiency by creating tags. Here's how it's done. (I'm taking the following information directly from Technorati's tag help page.)

To associate a post with a Technorati Tag all you have to do is "tag" your post by including a link with a defined tag relationship. For example:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]" rel="tag">[tagname]</a>

You do not need to include the brackets, just the descriptive keyword for your post. Just make sure to include rel="tag".

You do not have to link to Technorati. You can link to any URL that ends in something conforming to the tag standard. For example, these tag links would also be included on our Tag pages:

• <a href="http://apple.com/ipod" rel="tag">iPod</a>


• <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity" rel="tag">Gravity</a>


• <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/chihuahua" rel="tag">Chihuahua</a>

Once you have posted the tagged post, there are two ways to have your post included on a Technorati Tag page:

• If your blog software is configured to ping Technorati, congratulations! You're done!



• If your blog software does not support automatic pinging, or you haven't set it up yet, or you're not sure, you can manually ping us here. You might also want to configure your blog software to ping us automatically so you don't have to do that every time.

Your post should appear on the page in a few minutes (up to an hour during periods of intense activity).

While tags have signal importance, Technorati also puts a great deal of emphasis on what it calls "relevance." (So does Google for that matter.)

The way it does that is by "weighing" the number of links to a given site. The more links, the more importance Technorati assigns to a particular blog. For example, if you look at the Technorati page weighing the relevance of my company's blog, Radiant Marketing Group, you will see 311 links in to it (at the time of this writing anyway).

Technorati tracks the number of links, and the perceived relevance of blogs, as well as the real-time nature of blogging.

To quote the last paragraph of the About page, "Technorati displays what's important in the blogosphere...[and] makes it possible for you to find out what people on the Internet are saying about you, your company, your products, your competitors, your politics, or other areas of interest - all in real-time."

How important is that? In my view, it's vital! If you use a blog for business purposes, I hope it's a view you'll share. Make Technorati a site you visit regularly and one you include in your business blog strategy toolkit.