A Beginners Guide To Technorati

If you’re a beginning blogger or someone who is starting to hang out online, you eventually start seeing various social bookmarking and media sites out there as you roam around Al Gore’s Internet. 😉

In this article I’ll present a summary of one of those bookmarking sites, how it’s used and how you can use it as a blogger, if you are a blogger.

Technorati

Technorati currently tracks over 100 million blogs and over 200 million tagged blog posts. They organize the blogoshpere. They state that 175 million new blogs are created every day. Bloggers update their blogs to the tune of 1.6 million posts per day. That’s one blog post every 18 seconds. Yikes!!

In their own words:

Technorati is the leading monitor of the world of weblogs. Technorati is a real-time search engine that is the largest source of fresh information about the global and local conversations going on all across the Web. Technorati allows you to find out what people are saying about you, your company, your products, your competitors, your politics and, other areas of interest, on the Internet in real time.

Technorati organizes their site topically by channels:

• Business
• Entertainment
• Lifestyle
• Politics
• Sports
• Technology
• Search
• Blogger Central

Technorati’s Percolator technology looks at various attributes of how blog posts are linked including photos in blog posts and using other attributes to determine the “Attention” of blog posts. This allows Technorati to determine what’s hot and new, and what’s demanding the attention of the blogosphere.

There is an Authority Rating on Technorati when you find blog posts from various blogs. This Authority Rating is the rating of a particular blog based on links.

Import Your Favorite Blogs

If you use an RSS reader that allows you to export the blogs that are in your reader as an .opml file then you can import that file into Technorati. During the import process Technorati will discover what blogs you already have as favorites and ignore them. When you import, you’ll also be told how many blogs were imported and how many were websites and not blogs.

Why Would People Use Technorati?

For readers, Technorati is a great way for people to track what’s going on in the blogoshpere. By reading their favorite blogs that they add to their favorites at Technorati, a reader can filter through what’s important to them.

Another feature is the Technorati Top 100 Blogs, where readers can browse the top 100 bloggers and what they’re blogging about. Two ways you can view the top 100 is by Most Linked and Most Favorited. If you’re a blogger you should be reading these articles to see what it takes to get on that list or what people are reading and respecting.

The Technorati Blog Directory

Technorati has a blog directory in which they list blogs by the tags that a blog uses most often. You can add your blog(s) to Technorati through their Claim your blog feature. You can Ping your blog and Technorati will send its crawler around to your blog and index for you. You don’t have to ping your blog constantly. Technorati eventually comes around to your blog as you update your blog with new content. If you use WordPress or Blogger there is an option that you can set to make sure Technorati stops by and takes a look at your blog so it gets indexed. In WordPress it’s under the Options-> Privacy menu. Technorati provides other configurations here.

You can provide a badge or button on your blog that allows your readers to add your blog as one of their favorite blogs on Technorati. Various Technorati Widgets are here.

You can put the Add This Blog To My Technorati Favorites badge on your blog to make it easy for people to add your blog to their Technorati favorites. The code below is one to do that:

<!– Add to Technorati Favorites –>
<!– ===================== –>
<a href=”http://technorati.com/faves?sub=addfavbtn&add=PutYouBlogAddressHere” style=”margin-left: 10px”><img src=”http://static.technorati.com/pix/fave/tech-fav-1.png” alt=”Add to Technorati Favorites” border=”0″ /></a>
<!– ========================== –>
<!– End of Add to Technorati Favorites –>

There is a way to index your blog post automagically when Technorati comes around to your blog. If you use the following WordPress plugin you can tag your blog posts at the end of each post and Technorati will know how you want your blog posts indexed under what tags. You can use up to 20 tags. The WordPress plugin that I use is located here. I altered it a bit to act the way I wanted it to.

If you don’t use WordPress here is the code you can use:

Technorati Tags: [ <a href=’http://technorati.com/tag/YourTagGoesHere’ rel=’tag’>YourTagGoesHere</a> | <a href=’http://technorati.com/tag/Another+Tag+Goes+Here’ rel=’tag’>Another Tag Goes Here</a> ]

Here’s a link to Technorati Tag Guide.

You can create your Technorati account here.

[techtags: Social Bookmarking, Social Media, Technorati]