Technorati is a search engine which automatically receives a notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated.
Technorati Tags are a way of classifying blog posts – you can add tags to your blog posts by adding a rel=”tag” to tag links in your posts – however this method is cumbersome and prone to mistakes. Fortunately, if you are a WordPress user, Technorati automatically recognises your categories and uses them as Tags to classify your posts.
Why are Tags important? Well, if I want to see what has been written by bloggers recently on any topic, I simply browse to the Technorati Tag page for that topic and see all the latest posts. For instance the Technorati Tag page for Security at time of writing contains 4,620 posts from 850 blogs, all on security related topics.
But wait, there’s more! I can do a search in Technorati for a term of interest – and if I want to keep an eye on what people are writing about that term moving forward, I can create what is called a Watchlist for that term (the term can be anything – your company name, for instance – or your competitor’s name!). A Watchlist is a saved, constantly updating search so you can go back to the search and at any time see the latest posts on your term of interest. It gets even better, your Watchlists are also available as RSS feeds so you can keep an eye on them using your RSS reader!
Given that Tags are important and that WordPress categories translate into Technorati Tags, it follows that you should chose your WordPress category names very carefully. For instance, if you want to create a Category for posts about about your blog – you could call it, Blog, Blogging or Weblog. If you look at the equivalent Technorati Tags for these terms, you will see that the TagBlog has a Google Page Rank (PR) of 5 and has 42,678 posts from 7,422 blogs; Blogging has a PR of 4 and has 15,131 posts from 2,295 blogs; while Weblog has a PR of 2 and has 55,823 posts from 3,552 blogs.
So from a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) point of view, the best category name (of the three) to chose in WordPress would be Blog because it has the highest Google Page Rank (and has the highest number of associated blogs). A page with a high Page Rank linking to your site increases your own Page Rank and therefore your SEO.
Something to consider when creating WordPress categories.
thank you for the article tom, very interesting. For SEO purposes is it not equally important for the tags to have names relavant to the purpose and content of the blog as apposed to just ‘blog’ or ‘blogging’?
Thank you. I was not intense of the way the Technorati tags were interpreted by the see to engines. Would it be accurate to say that they are simulated to keywords just au reste opportune and important?
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Both title and subject name are important to Technorati and wordpress I think.
Great Tom, thanks for your informative post.
One thing I also like to do is to optimize the page title too. To do this I use freebie software that analyzes your page title, and then rates how effective it is:
http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/
I hope you or your readers find it useful?
Execllent guide! Not many people that even technorati tags have pagerank. Also take note that tags should be chosen wisely, our post titles also plays a major role on seo and also traffic.
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optimise the page title, that’s agreat tip. Thanks for sharing.
I just realized that WAY up there I said “logarithm” I am sure I meant algorithm
I always optimize my titles and subjects – they are very important also for google and other search engines
Don’t forget thought that if you are associated with a certain tag that has a very high pagerank, you are probably swimming in a very competitive sea …
Sometimes it makes sense to tag yourself into a medium or even less competitive niche …
Lex
Technorati really helps in generating more website visitors….this post is really helpful….
junior
Technology Blogger
Very helpful, already changing my tags
Greets
Execllent guide! Not many people that even technorati tags have pagerank. Also take note that tags should be chosen wisely, our post titles also plays a major role on seo and also traffic. This post is really helpful….
Thanks for the article Tom.
Online marketing is just developed so well due to search engine. I always optimize my titles and subjects – they are very important also for google and other search engines. For SEO purposes it is not equally important for the tags to have names relavant to the purpose but also content of the blog as apposed to just blog or blogging.
I have finally just changed my Permalink structure and now I am re-investigating my category setup. As far as the default link name blog\category\categoryname goes, is this a good approach. Do I actually need “category” in the URL?
I liked your thoughts above of how technorati tags relate to wordpress tags. I’ll have to check how my categories fair on technorati…except I don’t know how to use it yet
Hello Tom,
I’m new in SEO, permalink, and WP world (less than 2 months). However, I’ve had 2 websites, http://www.indo-handicraft.com and http://www.1001crafts.com which performs differently on Google Search Engine. My indo-handicraft.com seems to have more permanent rank on Google search engine (keyword: handmade bags, which is on page 3 of google search engine), while my 1001crafts.com seems to disappear 3-4 days on Google search engine.
I’ve noticed there’s a difference in permalink structure between indo-handicraft.com and 1001craft.com. I notice there’s a notice “If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t…” under indo-handicraft. But there’s NO notice under 1001crafts.com. Following your suggestion, both permalinks are set to:/%postname%/, but the indo-handicraft’s chmod is 644, while 1001crafts’ chmod is 666.
How can I make 1001crafts to have similar notice “If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t…” as indo-handicraft.com does? I want to make my 1001crafts similar to indo-handicraft so that 1001crafts will also be stable in google site rank.
Thank you so much Tom
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Execllent guide! Not many people that even technorati tags have pagerank. Also take note that tags should be chosen wisely, our post titles also plays Thank you so much Tom
Hasan Alper SOMUNCUOGLU
Nice article! I did not realize that Technorati read tags for WordPress sites automatically. Overall a great article. Thanks!
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I use the “All in One SEO Pack” plugin, from http://semperfiwebdesign.com/
I have all my blog posts showing up in Google nicely, for example:
Business, Real Estate and Investing Products | Lerner Consulting, Inc.
May 21, 2010 … Real Estate Investing methods, techniques, resources. Cost $thousands less than the major workshops, yet speed your making money through …
http://www.lernerconsult.com/blog/business-real-estate-investing-products/ – Cached