Guest Post: Trish Jones

Trish Jones, MBA, is an online marketing consultant and has created and managed her own Internet business, since 2004. Trish teaches entrepreneurs, independent professionals and small business owners how to attract more clients and make more money using a simple blog. For more blogging tips, go to www.trishjones.com

Techno Who!?

This is the response I usually get from my clients when I suggest that they need to link their blog to Technorati.

But, if you have a blog, or you are thinking of adding one to an existing website, Technorati, the largest blog search engine is definately a site you'll want to romance with. This specialized search engine is devoted entirely to searching through blogs, and lately, it has started to seriously compete with search engine giants such as Google and Yahoo.

So, What Does Technorati Do?

Essentially, Technorati can index your blogs, whether they are about cooking, financing, engineering or entertainment. The name itself is based on a joining of the words technology and literati, the later referring to a group of critical intellectuals (I didn't feature in the latter group!). By tagging Technorati throughout your post e.g. this post is about commercial financing, you'll keep your posts at or near the top of the list at Technorati. And, to simplify this process, you can use a plugin called Tagalize It which makes tagging throughout your blog posts a really simple task.

I'm sure your next question is how can Technorati benefit my business?

At the most basic, you'll find that Technorati is one more way to let the people looking for your service find you. When people search using Technorati, they are searching for information that has a personal bent to it, and has a presentation that they find easy to read. In other words, people who search Technorati are looking for good information, and if they can find you and you can provide that information they are looking for, you will be one giant step closer to getting a customer, client or subscriber.

In terms of optimizing your blog for Technorati, be aware that the first and best thing that you can do is to tag your entries as I've explained earlier. If you haven't done this yet for your older entries, take the time to go back and tag them. Although this can be time consuming if you're working through a long backlog, you'll find that it will pay off once the hits start coming in. While you shouldn't go overboard, you'll find that you can use several tags on a single blog entry to help people find what they are looking for. For instance, if you have a cooking blog, an Italian recipe could easily have the tags, “Italian,” “vegetarian,” and “mozzarella.”

Although Technocrati has been criticized for not taking into account the 56 million blogs on MySpace, you'll find that it can still be quite useful to you and has some attractive search engine benefits particularly when you get ranked at or near the top.

Until next time,

Source: optimizing your blog