Global Voices Online

I see a lot of great blogs from all over the world, many of them highlighted right here on Global Voices. They are top notch writers and thinkers supplying new insights and fresh thoughts on issues that face us every day. However, the bloggers don't seem to have as many readers as they could.

I was thinking about that one day and realized that most people don't know how to tag their blog in order for it to be indexed by the top blog search engine: Technorati. Technorati is a valuable tool that can greatly increase your readership, and if you register and create a profile it will help you build your personal “brand” on the web.

Tag your blog if you want more readers
Technorati reports that there are 75,000 new blogs being created every day, what are you doing to make yours stand out? What are you doing to make it visible?

One of the easiest tools is to begin tagging your posts with the code necessary for Technorati to index it in the 27.7 million blogs that they track. All tagging is, is a way to help people find your article in the myriad of others. If you write a blog post highlighting African technology bloggers, you might tag it “Africa”, “African”, “blog”, “technology”, “tech”, etc… It's very simple and it makes sense to do over time.

It can sound daunting at first, because now you're dealing with that scary thing called “code.” But it's really very easy. Take the below template, which I've tagged for “africa”, and replace the word “africa” with the tag of your choice:

<!– technorati tags begin –><p style=”font-size:10px;text-align:right;”>technorati tags: <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/africa” rel=”tag”>africa</a></p><!– technorati tags end –>

That's how easy it is. Rinse and repeat with different tags. If you have 4 tags, it might look like this:

<!– technorati tags begin –><p style=”font-size:10px;text-align:right;”>technorati tags: <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/africa” rel=”tag”>africa</a>, <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/technology” rel=”tag”>technology</a>, <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/african” rel=”tag”>african</a>, <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/blog” rel=”tag”>blog</a></p><!– technorati tags end –>


For those who are interested in knowing how I put code onto a blog as an example, you can do that easily using Tamba2's tool.

NOTE: WordPress user's categories are automatically indexed as the tag, but sometimes you still want to use this code to add other tags than are in the categories.

technorati tags: technology, technorati, tagging, how to