Tagging Your Blog

How exactly is the Technorati Search Engine benefiting the world of blogs. Well... bloggers already know that in order to keep their blog afloat fresh, quality content, links and a method of reaching subscribers is essential. Since blogs are constantly changing and new content is posted continuously, creating and maintaining a popular blog can be tricky, time consuming and difficult to gage. Technorati has stepped in with an added option that will place bloggers a step closer to their audience. Technorati not only specializes in the indexing and tracking of blogs, they have incorporated the idea of "tags" in their search engine to aid those looking for topic specific blogs. Technorati has intertwined this method of 'free-form' keyword categorization system in their search engine, which enables writers to label their posts. Tagging enables bloggers/writers to decide and list which subject/keyword they feel their post is best suited under in efforts of reaching their audience. It's a great tool for people to categorize their posts, photos, and links.

Technorati has their search engine broken up in a variety of useful ways to get the most out of your search experience. Initially they have your standard search box for general search queries; followed by their navigational bar, which has options enabling users to choose "tags" "blogs" or "popular" to better suit, their queries. Also incorporated is an easy popularity indicator for tags; by simply looking at the size of the tags text users are able to gage how popular a specific category is, the bigger the text the more active that category. On the intro page for Tags the Technorati team has a list of their top 250 tags, which is great for a quick reference glance into what people are writing about.

Thinking about incorporating tags in your blog, well its extremely simple and pretty efficient, to include tags in your posts Technorati has 2 easy to follow options for users to engage in.

1. For those who's software currently supports "categories and RSS/Atom feeds" i.e. WordPress, Movable Type, Blogware and a few others, be sure that you include the category system; double check to see if you are publishing RSS/Atom feeds so then your categories will be taken as your "tags" for postings.

2. If your Blog software doesn't currently read "categories" as "tags" you can add them individually by adding a link in your post to tag it.
Example: (insert_name)
Replace the (insert_name) with a tag/word of your choice; remove the parentheses and replace with a word that is related to your post.

Now once you've added all your tags in your post be sure to Ping Technorati so that your post can show up as quickly as possible.

Our experience with tags has been great; we have come to learn that they are extremely beneficial, a little time consuming and provides blogs with an overall extra boost in distributing your posts. A few of our pages have been indexed fairly quickly under certain tags, while others have taken a little longer. Regardless, its been great to see results popping up thru a different venue.

Do try to keep your tags relevant, creative and most importantly descriptive!

tags blogging weblogs wordpress blogger technorati