How to Tag Your Blog and Increase Your Readership

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: , , ,

12 comments

  • JKE

    Congratulations on your first & interesting post on GV!
    As for tagging the entries, I tried a WP plug-in (ultimate tag warrior) but got tired of adding tags all the time + didn’t have the time yet to fully implement it in my blog. Guess I will do so soon, so thx for reminding…

  • Thanks JKE. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t use the tags 100% of the time either. I do try and use them in “important” posts that I want people to read though.

  • […] If you write blog posts, make podcasts, or upload photos to Flickr related to Hao, please tag them in Technorati and Del.icio.us. In English please use: freehaowu and in Chinese with 释放吴皓.  For instructions about how to tag blog posts in Technorati click here. […]

  • Great post. I’ve wondered about how Technorati dependent a site should become. I’m addicted to my Technorati rankings, but haven’t noticed a large increase in traffic when Technorati tags are implemented. Of course, Technorati is growing fast, so maybe I should just bear with it.

  • You can also create a Technorati bookmarklet (at least in Firefox) that automatically creates the code.

    Also, I have found that ‘social bookmarking tools’ are a huge benefit to increasing readership. I use OnlyWire to automatically post to about a dozen, including del.icio.us, Furl, ma.gnolia and Spurl. OnlyWire can be a little buggy, and you can’t toggle back and forth between several OnlyWire accounts (though the OnlyWire people have told me they’re developing auto-signout to take care of that), but it beats saving in a dozen separate services.

    Finally, ping like mad. Some services allow you to drop all the services in so they’re automatically pinged. If you don’t have that, you can use a service like http://www.pingoat.com, which pings about 50 services around the globe.

  • Curt, your point on using the social bookmarking tools is spot-on, but it can be a bear to manage. Thanks for pointing me to OnlyWire, I hadn’t noticed their services before, that makes it much easier to handle.

  • Ed, I think the value of technorati lies not only in the links you pick up from them, but also in the credibility it gives your blog. People go there to see how many others have linked to you and sometimes to see your profile.

  • This was a very useful post. I would like to see more like it. Nuts-and-bolts stuff is important!

  • I will give it a try. By the way, I found your site on google.
    Thanks!

  • i am going to give it a try. thanks bro.

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