Remarkablogger

Overview

• What is Technorati?
• Research on Technorati
• Claim a Blog on Technorati

Note: Part 2 covers how to set up a Technorati widget for your blog and how to use Technorati tags, which are the real traffic drivers. Part 1 covers the basics of getting set up.

What is Technorati?

Technorati shows you what’s happening in the blogosphere:

• Who’s posting on what subjects
• What’s popular, segmented by media type
• Who’s linking to whom
• Who owns what blogs, and what rank and authority they have (based on inbound links)

Technorati has two major aspects that come together in powerful ways. The first aspect is claiming a blog. When you create a free account at Technorati, you can claim your blogs so that others know they are yours. The second aspect is Technorati Tags. Technorati tags are short single word (usually) descriptions to classify blog posts. With the name of a blogger, the name of a blog, and Technorati Tags, Technorati can show you all kinds of wonderful things about who’s blogging about what and who’s linking to them. You can search on Technorati, or you can browse by tag or by media type.

Research on Technorati

The world of blog, bloggers, and blogging is known as the blogosphere, and Technorati is like the news reporting service for what’s going on it the blogosphere. Even without an account, you can benefit from Technorati. Let’s say you were interested in starting a blog and you have a possible idea: caring for aging parents. Let’s see what Technorati can tell us about what’s going on with blogs on this topic.

If you were to enter keywords aging parents into Technorati search and then click the blogs tab near the top of the results (Run this search at Technorati), you would see some promising information: 21 blogs appear to be about this subject (at the time of this post). That’s not too many, nor is it too few. You have fellow bloggers to link to, and the pool is small enough for you to establish yourself prominently in the space if you do the right things over time. If you try a similar search for the keywords elder care, you get even more blogs. This widens your world a little bit for more link and resource possibilities on related keywords.

Some of these might be splogs (spam blogs). If there are splogs set up around these keywords, that means that you might be able to make some money from placing context-sensitive ads on your blog (not right away, but later, after you’ve built an audience and established trust). Splogs make money in an unethical, deceptive manner. Their presence in this space shows you that there is money to be made, but we prefer to do it honestly, with excellent content. One thing to look for is the pink boxes next to each result. These show how many people have marked one of these blogs as a favorite. The more favorites a blog has, the more likely it has quality content and is popular. That would make that blog an important one in your blogging niche. There certainly is plenty of research you can do on keywords by themselves, using more complex tools (which I’ll write about soon), but searching Technorati is an easy, non-technical, and offers high information returns on minimum effort.

Claim a Blog on Technorati

To reap the full benefits of Technorati, you must create an account (they are free). When you click the Join link, you are asked to supply a username, an email address, a password, and to check the box that you accept their privacy policy and terms of service. Then you want to click to edit your profile. This is where you supply biographical information about yourself, supply a photo (yes, do it, and have a good one), and begin the process of claiming a blog.

When you click the link to claim a blog, you need to supply your blog’s URL (Uniform Resource Locator—a website’s address). From there, you are walked through the claim process step by step. You will be claiming your blog by post, which means Technorati will supply you with a bit of HTML hyperlink code. You have to copy and paste this code into a blog post. You can just add it into a new post. One thing to be careful about: you need to edit the HTML directly for your blogging system, rather than using the visual or WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get, i.e. no code writing).

Do not close the Technorati claim page! Open your blog admin page in a new window or tab, write your post, paste in the claim code, and publish the post. Come back to the Technorati claim page and click the button that says Release the Spiders! (a spider is an automated program that scans the internet for a particular purpose, in this case, it’s to check your claim code and index your blog’s content for Technorati).

Once Technorati has spidered your blog, you can create a widget that you can add to your blog’s sidebar that shows visitors your Technorati information. This, and how to add Technorati Tags to your blog posts will be in Build Blog Traffic with Technorati, Part 2.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blog traffic, build traffic, build blog traffic, technorati, using technorati