Ultimate Guide to Using Technorati

What is Technorati? For those of you unfamiliar with Technorati, it is an internet search engine based out of San Francisco, California, that focuses on blogs by searching weblogs for keywords. As of August 2006, it is reportedly indexing over 50.6 million weblogs.

Why bloggers should care about Technorati

Over the past 3 years, Technorati has grown into a powerhouse in the blogging industry, making it an extremely important part to any blogs success. If you own a weblog, you will first want to register with Technorati and claim your blog. Claiming your blog entitles you the opportunity to enter information about your blog, including a blog description and any keywords that describe your blog, as well as allowing you to get your blog included in the Technorati Blog Finder. This will allow you more control over what potential readers will see and also make your blog more accessible. When creating keywords, if your blog content appeals to a specific country, place that countries name in your keywords to show up in that countries blog list. Technorati also puts a link to your profile on every inbound link, meaning a quality profile is also recommended and will go a long way to show you are a professional.

Once you’re done claiming your blog, you will want to start tagging your blog posts so that Technorati knows how best to index your website. Typepad recently integrated Technorati into their blogging platform, and Wordpress has a couple plugins available: Bunny’s Technorati Tags and Oddiophile’s Technorati Tags Bookmarklet. If your blogging service doesn’t offer Technorati, you have other options. The one I recommend is Keotag, which offers a Tag Generator to assist bloggers in creating Technorati Tags.

For Step 1, you will want to add any keywords that are relevant to your post. If your keyword is two words or more, you will need to use an addition sign between words to link them as one phrase, otherwise it will be considered two seperate links. After typing your keywords, go to Step 2 and click the Technorati icon. This will generate Step 3, which is the code to add to the bottom of your individual post. For your convenience, Keotag gives you both the raw code and provides the links in HTML format. Cut and paste your code of choice into the bottom of your post and you’re done!

If you find you use Windows Live Writer when blogging, Tag4Writer is a plugin that was created to help with Technorati tagging.

There are also tag generators available for people who use the Greasemonkey firefox extension. The following are ones come recommended from Technorati’s website:

• Technorati Tags Button - Greasemonkey script for the popular Firefox extension.
• Magical Sheep - Greasemonkey script for Blogger users.

If you find you’re having problems with getting Technorati to index your blog, check out Quick Online Tips guide 5 Tips to Better Technorati Indexing.

Whenever you publish a post, you’ll want Technorati to know right away that you’ve made an update. Some blogging services have this built in. In case yours doesn’t, the most effective method I have found is using a free pinging service. Pingoat and Ping-o-matic are free services that allow you to notify several websites with one click that you have updated your blog. You can also check out this post from WizBangTech which provides instructions on how to add Technorati Cosmos Links to a particular post. This great write up includes how to’s for several different blogging platforms.

Why readers should care about Technorati

If you’re a blog reader, there are a few reasons you’ll want to get to know Technorati a little better. The most important reason is that Technorati provides the best blog search results, using their blog search engine. Because they specialize in blogs and index roughly 50 million blogs, Technorati is your best bet to find the blog posts you are looking for. Just like any search engine, they index and rank the blogs individually, with the more popular blogs being towards the top.

Technorati used to only benefit bloggers and there was little incentive for a non-blogger to use their services. Thanks to Technorati Favorites, readers have another reason to use Technorati’s services. On many websites you will find an Add to Technorati Favorites button. With the Technorati Favorites feature, it now works similar to a feed reader, allowing you to view the latest posts from any websites you have marked as your favorites. You can also import your favorites using an OPML file. If you prefer a feed reader, you can even have your favorites turned into a feed and plug that into your feed reader. The only downsides I have found so far are the limit of 50 blogs which can be marked as favorites, and there is a maximum of 6 pages that can be viewed.

If you decide to use Technorati as your feed reader, you may want to look into getting a Bookmarklet to make adding feeds easier.

Features and Integrating Technorati

Technorati provides a neat feature called Technorati Watchlists. Watchlists allow you to constantly search for whatever it is you want to search for. Create your Technorati search and click Add to Watchlist and you’re all set. If you’ve ever wondered how people always know right away when you link to them, this is one way. Once you have your watchlist created, click on View in RSS Format (in the lower left hand corner) to get an RSS feed of the watchlist. Throw the feed in your feed reader and you’ll get instant updates whenever someone links to the designated website in your watchlist. For more information about Technorati watchlists, check out this Technorati Watchlist FAQ.

Integrate Technorati Into Your Web Browser

Technorati has added several ways to integrate itself into your web browser. If you’re a Firefox user, you can get Firefox Search Plugins to add Technorati Search into your Firefox Search screen.

The free Firefox based web browser Flock comes with Technorati features pre-built into the web browser, so no need to mess around with adding any.

You can also get Technorati Browser Buttons (also known as Favelets or Bookmarklets), which are hyperlinks you can simply drag and drop into your browser’s Link Toolbar.

You can choose from the following browser buttons:

• Technorati This!
• Technorati This! (in a new window)
• Favorite This!
• Technorati Blog Info

The above link includes step by step instructions for installation on Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox, as well as a list of 3 different ways to use the Technorati This! feature.

Integrate Technorati Into Your Operating System/Desktop

If you are a MAC OS X user, you have the option of adding a Technorati Dashboard Widget, Technorati Tag Generator, or Technorati Ping.

Technorati also offers a service called the Technorati Mini, which is a mini version of Technorati in a mini window that checks for search results every minute. This is a handy feature for when you find yourself constantly searching for a particular topic.

Integrate Technorati Into Your Website

If you would like a Technorati Favorites button on your blog, you have a couple options. If you have a basic knowledge of HTML, you can visit Technorati’s FavButtons page and grab your favorite button. If you’re a Wordpress user, you can also try this Technorati Favorites Plugin. It will give you the choice of several types of buttons.

If you enjoy this blog, you can click that button to add Slick Affiliate to your Technorati Favorites. Why is this important to your blog? Well, not only does Technorati factor inbound links into your blog ranking, they also take into account how many times your blog has been added as a Technorati favorite; therefore, making it easy for your readers to favorite your blog can go a long way towards improving your Technorati Blog Ranking.

If you would like to display a box showing your Technorati Favorites to others on your website, Technorati recently added a Favorites Widget. This widget will provide you HTML code needed to display a little box on your sidebar showing posts from websites you have marked as one of your favorites.

Another great widget is the Technorati Link Count Widget, which adds a View blog reactions link to each of your posts, allowing your readers to see the blogosphere’s reaction to that particular post. As more people talk about it, the widget shows the number of people linking to your post.

If you’re interested in adding Technorati search to your website, I recently posted instructions on how to add a Technorati Search Engine to your Weblog. This will add a Technorati Search box on your website which is based off the one Technorati uses. Simply type in the Keyword or URL to do a search using Technorati. Here is how it looks on my site:

Other Miscellaneous

If you can’t get enough of Technorati and you want to take it with you when your away from your computer, Technorati also offers Mobile Services.

Technorati Related Blogs:

• Official Technorati Weblog