Technorati - a Must for a Blogger

Is it possible to have a blog and have no idea on what Technorati is? I doubt it. Technorati allows you, in short, to see what others are saying about your blog, who they are, where they link to you and what they think. It shows a quick brief of what people on the net are searching for and what topics are hot in the blogosphere. Technorati searches the blogosphere regularly, showing the most recent posts and links on the website.

Tagging lies at the heart of the website, with the real emphasis around what other people are saying about you and your blog. Technorati can be a very useful tool in business, analyzing figures and statistics and compiling the results into an easy-to-understand graph. Many things are provided, with everything from the number of times a certain word popped up in blog posts on a certain day, to the amount of posts made on a certain day, on a blog.

The first thing you need to do with Technorati as a blogger is claim your blog. Claiming is extremely easy. You can choose to do it various ways, but the most commonly used method (and by far the easiest, especially when using a free host), is to insert a snippet of short code within the website’s template. The meta tag does nothing, but lets the bot at Technorati know that you are the rightful owner of the blog, having already claimed it. Simply sign up for an account and click the green ‘Claim Your Blog’ button.

Technorati prides itself in having rapid response times to events that happen in the blogosphere. ‘Nearly instant’ is how many have quoted it, however I wouldn’t go that far. Though Technorati usually reports findings within a day, I found that it misses some things. For example, a few months back, the NABAZTAG blog linked to an article on my own, Techzi. Even now, Technorati is yet to acknowledge this. I myself found out about the link thanks to Google, but it just goes to show that Technorati is not 100% accurate.

‘Searching the World Live Web’ is something that Technorati has used as a tag line many a time. Again, stressing the ‘Almost instant’ ability to search blogs. ‘Technorati This’ is a bookmarklet, provided by the website which lets you submit, and easily tag articles for general viewing. The button sits in your browser, along with any other buttons you might already have. For example, it sits in between my ‘del.icio.us‘ and ‘Gmail’ buttons in Firefox 2. Great as this might be, for driving traffic to posts on blogs, I much prefer using del.icio.us, Reddit and Digg, as they drive more targeted traffic faster than other alternatives.

An idea that I heard mentioned at RWT, was that, ‘Technorati should offer a keyword tool like Overture, excuse me, Yahoo Search Marketing, that displays how many searches occurred on a given keyword phrase for a given month. Bloggers could then optimize their categories and their blogs…’ - And I believe that if Technorati were to do something like this, it would be a massive success.

At the end of the day, Technorati is a great tool for general analysis of your blog, and a new approach to general rankings of websites. Alexa bases a website’s popularity based on the number of hits it receives from web surfers using the Alexa toolbar, but Technorati dared to be different, in ranking blogs by how many links in they receive from different blogs. They dared to be different and it paid off. Technorati has evolved and developed dramatically since its launch and is now a highly useful tool in the belt of any internet professional, webmaster or enthusiast. Highly recommended!