How to add technorati tags to your blog post and why should you?

What is technorati?

Technorati is like a search engine that indexes blogs and the information on them. People go to technorati looking for specific information and put in a search request just like they would at google, yahoo or ask. The answers they receive are all from blogs.

What is a technorati tag?

A technorati tag is basically a keyword that people might search on at the site that will bring up your blog post. When you place technorati tags in your blog post your post goes directly into the search results for that tag. When someone searches for example “technorati tag” and I have that in my technorati tags at the bottom of the page this post will come up.

Now don’t get the technorati tags mixed up with the tags you can put in at the bottom of most blogging platforms. They are different. The tags you use on your blogging platform help you come up in their search requests. Technorati tags you have to add yourself. It may take, oh, I don’t know, an extra 30 seconds, but it’s definitely time well spent. I have noticed a large portion of my traffic coming from technorati.

How do add technorati tags?

That parts easy and there’s a couple things you need to do before you get to tagging.

Claim Your Blog!

What the heck does that mean? It’s really simple. Go to Technorati and sign up for an account (it’s free). Once you have an account you will see a button that says “claim blog”. Click that, simply input the information about your blog and the rss feed and it’s done. There are a few ways to claim your blog, I always just do the easy way. There, now you are done! Claiming your blog allows Technorati to come over and see what you are doing and index your blog in it’s search results.

How do you add Technorati tags to blog posts?

It is really simple. There’s a great technorati tag generator. You just click on the link and then bookmark the page in your favorite social bookmarking site so you can find it later. Once you are there, just enter the keywords you want as tags in the form. Be creative, but don’t be ridiculous. Stick to anything and everything your blog post is about. Then go down and unclick all the social bookmarking sites so only technorati is checked and hit go. Then highlight the html code it will give you. Come back to your blog and click to the html version. Go to the bottom of the post and paste the code. Then switch over to the text editor and you should be able to see your tags. That’s it! Really simple!

Pinging: What is it and why should you do it?

Pinging is the simple act of letting the rss feed services, including technorati, know that you have updated your blog. There are many many places of these feed services available and although it only takes a second to ping since there are so many it could end up taking a while. Good thing there are some great pinging services. Here are my favorites: Pingoat, Feed Shark, and Pingomatic. Make sure you bookmark these sites as well so you can find them quickly, you will want to ping each time you make a new blog post.

So there you have it. All you need to know to utilize Technorati, and pinging, you should notice an increase in traffic pretty soon!

****Update****

The newest versions of wordpress automatically generate technorati tags from the tags box. So now it is all done in one step.