Technorati
Everybody knows about Technorati and what it aims to do in terms of publicising blogs and bringing traffic to them. If you don’t, and you write a blog, then you should pay them a visit.
I now have two active blogs (though, truth be told, this one is slightly less active) and I am now trying to get things moving on the readership front. I know that I have a few regular readers but I’d like to establish a wider circulation for what I have to say. I found this post on Blogger which gave a useful suggestion which I have applied to A View From The West. And I also found a very helpful article about Traffic Generation over on No nonsense Internet Tips. That article, and most other places I have looked, all refer to Technorati as being pretty much the top tool to use when publicising your blog. So I hopped on over there and claimed my blogs.
The claim process is really straight forward and took just a few seconds to complete for each blog. The process is as follows:
- enter the url of the blog you wish to claim;
- provide your log on credentials for that blog;
- enter a description for the blog along with a set of tags/keywords that relate to your blog;
- select a button to display your affiliation with Technorati (or not);
- and save your blog’s details.
You should now have a profile for your blog which you can return to and edit at any time.
Next, it is worth displaying the Technorati claim widget on your blog – click the Edit Widget button for your blog to do this. The widget configuration page then shows a preview of the widget and presents a range of options for you to select. Setting these options dictate the size and information contained by the widget. You can select whether or not to include any of these: a photo/avatar; a Technorati search link; a Technorati search box; your Technorati Authority; a link to your profile at Technorati, and; a Tag Cloud. Once you’ve made your selections you need to save your changes then cut and paste the widget code to your blog. The widget will then appear on your blog, though not instantly, so allow for a delay of up to a few hours before it does appear.
Overall, my Technorati experience was quite satisfying though at times the site was slow to respond. In my case, it took about 6 hours for the widget to appear on my first blog (A View From The West) which caused a bit of impatience on my part. One slight niggle remains in that I haven’t yet managed to install the widget on this blog but I think that is a WordPress issue rather than a Technorati one.
Final Score: 4 out of 5
UPDATE: The Technocrati widget does not display correctly on this blog because WordPress removes SCRIPT tags from any code placed in a WordPress widget for security reasons. This is something to bear in mind if you plan to add this Technocrati widget to your own WordPress blog.
If you want to see the Technocrati widget in all it’s glory, visit A View From The West and check out the right hand column of my blog.
