All about Technorati - A Blogger's Perspective
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As a blogger, should you bother to get indexed on Technorati? If you update your blogs every day, or at least once in three days, then Technorati is a good bet. Technorati ranks blogs based on time updated, not on relevance (this was my major sore point with the engine). However, Technorati has so many users who are constantly reading up on popular posts that if you are operating under a relatively rare tag (keyword) and you refresh constantly, you are guaranteed to be constantly hit.
The indexing tool is based on how users tag their blogs, so sometimes there is a lot of confusion when the results come out. With the top ranked (most recent) blogs probably containing irrelevant data, from a blogger's perspective Technorati is wide open if you know how to optimize for blog search. This is quite doable despite the fact that it seems a lot of bloggers cannot optimize or believe blogs can't be optimized.
Claiming and Optimizing Your Blog for Technorati
If you own a blog, you go to Technorati's home page at www.technorati.com, register your blog and include a description and keywords to describe your blog. If you have country specific content, list the country in your key word. Include a good quality profile (the search engine links back to your profile on every link). You can create your blog anywhere; you do not have to create it on Technorati.
Why Bother Optimizing For Technorati?
On forum boards and on blogs, bloggers post complaints about poor indexing by Technorati. These complaints include statements that Technorati does not index their updates and their posts never seem to show up on the listings in the categories they tagged. Technorati actually expects a bit of work from the blogger. It doesn't actually index via new blog posts by any known automated process; perhaps they are still keeping it a secret. But if you are a blogger, what is the point of having an excellent blog if it never gets seen?
Tagging: You tag every post under specific topics and notify Technorati every time you update via several means. One way is by you outputting a full feed via RSS or Atom. However, according to Kevin Marks of Technorati, it is preferable that you use an Atom Feed. Also remember that the Technorati spider does not index any page off the main page; it does not engage in deep crawling, unlike Google's blog search. If you are using blog software such as Word Press, Movable Type, or Blogger, your category section will be automatically read as tags. Otherwise, include this link in the body of your post to enable Technorati to read your tags.
<_a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]" rel="tag">[tagname]<_/a>
Pinging: You can also ping Technorati to notify it of updates. There are some free pinging services such as http://www.pingoat.com/ and http://www.pingomatic.com/. Pinging also allows you to notify multiple websites about your updates.
Markup: Surprising but true, your HTML still matters. Invalid markup will discourage the spider. If it encounters a glitch while indexing it may simply stop indexing your post.
All things being equal, a little extra work on your blog may make it come up with surprising regularity under specific categories. As for blog entries, you will wan tot post as often as possible (twice a day if practical). You don't have to write a thesis; five lines could warrant an update.
Blog optimization is a topic which involves mostly technical skills, such as archiving links so that they won't become untraceable, link development, and some marketing, mostly in the area of urging people to leave comments or to bookmark your blog in one form or another.
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