Remarkablogger

Continued from Build Blog Traffic with Technorati, Part 1

Overview

• Add Technorati widgets to your Blog
• Use Technorati Tags to Build Blog Traffic
• My Solution for Adding Technorati Tags to Posts

Add Technorati widgets to your Blog

Note:Technorati recently revamped their blog codes and widgets, so be careful about other articles on the web about this subject—make sure they’re talking about the new Technorati codes.

To add Technorati widgets to your blog, you need to go to your account profile page by logging in to Technorati and then click the Blogs tab. You’ll see a list of the blogs you’ve claimed, and for each one, there is a little green edit widget button.

Basically, all you need to do is check or uncheck the options you want for your widget:

• Your photo
• List of links of blogs that link to your blog
• A search box that allows your visitors to search on Technorati
• Display your Technorati authority number, which is the number of blogs linking to you in the last 6 months.
• A link to your Technorati profile, so your blog’s visitors can view it.
• A Technorati Tag Cloud. When a tag is clicked, your blog visitor goes to a Technorati page that lists all your blog’s posts that used that tag.

Note: The last couple times I’ve edited a Technorati widget, the editing page looked funny, as though there was a margin or padding mistake in the CSS. I hope they get it fixed soon!

Once you’ve decided what you want in your widget, you copy the code in the textarea (box you can type in or that can display text) and paste it where you want it to go in your blog. This is almost always a sidebar of some kind, but it could also be at the bottom of your blog. On WordPress, you will need to edit sidebar.php. In Blogger, you will need to add HTML/JavaScript under Edit Layout. Paste in your code. FTP the changed sidebar.php file to your webserver, and refresh the page. See if your Technorati widget is there and how it’s doing. Don’t forget that after you copy and paste the code, you have to click the save changes button on the widget. Also, your changes may not show up in the widget immediately! Give it a few minutes, then reload the web page. Once you’re done, you have a nice Technorati widget for your blog! You can see mine in the first sidebar at the right (and yes, that’s my Technorati authority! It pays to give out free WordPress themes with links back to yourself!).

Use Technorati Tags to Build Blog Traffic

Now that we’ve got everything all set up, this is the fun part! Technorati tags are short descriptors of a blog post’s content. For example, since I’m writing a blog post about Technorati, I’m going to add a Technorati tag for the word “Technorati.” Other people have blogged about Technorati, and used the same tag in their blog posts. A search on Technorati for the “Technorati” tag returns a list all the bloggers using that tag, increasing the chance that they will get visits by people interested in that tag. One thing to note, however, is that the busier a tag is, the faster your post will fall off the first screen. Adding Technorati tags to your blog posts will get you increased traffic. How much traffic you will get depends on many factors. People do click on tags they’re interested in. When your blog shows up as posting with a particular tag they’re interested in, they are more likely rather than less likely to visit your blog.

The HTML of a Technorati tag (sorry to get a little nerdy on you but it helps explain things and it’s good to know) looks like this:

<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/tag+name" rel="tag">Tag Name</a>

“Tag Name” stands in for any words you want to use as a tag. There are two things to notice about this code:

1. The rel attribute is set to tag.
2. Multiple-word tag names use a plus sign (+) between the words in the link destination text (tag+name in the code above).

If you’re proficient in HTML you can write these links yourself into a blog post, but it quickly bogs down into torturous tedium! That’s why most bloggers who really want to benefit from Technorati tags have to use some sort of tool that helps to automate the process of adding tags to a post. There is a variety of choice when it comes to these tools. Your decision will depend on several factors:

1. Do you have multiple blogs? If you have multiple blogs, and you want to incorporate a Technorati tag-generating widget/plugin/thingy into your post writing screen, you will have to repeat its installation/configuration for each blog you manage. It can be kind of a pain to do this, but once done you may feel that it has been totally worth it.
2. Are your blogs all using the same platform (WordPress, Blogger, etc.), or different platforms? Imagine all the work mentioned above but compounded by different blogging platforms. It would be nice if there were somehow one solution for all platforms that would work on the server side when writing a post, but there isn’t.
3. How comfortable are you at fiddling with your blogging platform’s template tags, HTML, PHP, and CSS? Some of the Technorati tag plugins or add-ons can involve complicated set-up and configuration. You may have to edit parts of your blog’s template code so that the Technorati tags will appear in the right place, look correct, and work properly.

With the above points in mind, here is a list of popular WordPress plugins (note that some of them are for social bookmarking sites). One plugin that’s particularly popular and powerful is Ultimate Tag Warrior.

My Solution for Adding Technorati Tags to Posts

As for myself, I use a very simple solution, one that works no matter what blog I’m working on or what platform it’s hosted on. The only work involved is if I want a specific look to the tags, I need to create a class in my CSS stylesheet. This isn’t strictly necessary: your Technorati tags will simply be a list of normal hyperlinks. What I use is called a bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is a bookmark (or favorite, if you use Microsoft Internet Explorer for your web browser) that, instead of sending you to a web page, executes a wee little program written in JavaScript. I got this code from Rakesh of Bravra Mann. To use this, follow these steps:

Note: This doesn’t seem to work, anymore. Not sure why, but there it is. There are plenty of Technorati tag plugins for WordPress, so try your luck with one of them.

1. Click and drag to highlight the code below.
2. Drag the selected code up to your browser’s bookmark toolbar (make sure it’s visible).
3. Right-click to rename the bookmark to something more friendly.
4. Create a post in a blog to test it.
5. Click on the bookmark, and a prompt appears. Type in the words you want to use as Technorati tags, separated by commas—multiple-word tags separated by spaces (comma after the last word in the tag) are okay.
6. Click OK or hit Enter. Your HTML code is ready and pre-highlighted. Copy it using CTRL+C on your keyboard (Cmd+C on a Mac).
7. After you’ve copied the code, click OK or hit Enter again to close the prompt box.
8. Paste the code where you want your list of Technorati tags to be (usually at the end of the post).

Here is the code:javascript:(function(){var a=”;var t=prompt(’Enter Tags Separated by Comma and Space, Multiple Word Tags are A-OK!:’,”);var theSplit=/\W?,\W?/g;var tr=t.split(theSplit);a+=’<span class=’+unescape(’%22′)+’technoratitag’+unescape(’%22′)+’>Technorati Tags: ‘;for(var i=0;i<tr.length;i++){var checkplus=tr[i].indexOf(’ ‘);if(i > 0){a+=’, ‘;}if (checkplus==’-1′){a+=’<a href=’+unescape(’%22′)+’http://www.technorati.com/tags/’+tr[i]+unescape(’%22′)+’ rel=’+unescape(’%22′)+’tag’+unescape(’%22′)+’>'+tr[i]+’</a>’;}else {var chat=”;var plus=tr[i].split(’ ‘);for(var q=0;q<plus.length;q++){chat+=plus[q];if (q<plus.length-1){chat+=’+';}}a+=’<a href=’+unescape(’%22′)+’http://www.technorati.com/tags/’+chat+unescape(’%22′)+’ rel=’+unescape(’%22′)+’tag’+unescape(’%22′)+’>’+tr[i]+’</a>’;}}a+=’</span>’;prompt(’Copy this code, press OK, then paste to your blog entry:’,a);})()

That’s it! Happy tagging! If you use WordPress (especially WordPress.com), and want to play with the code in order to customize the output, I suggest you read Lorelle VanFossen’s thorough post on this.

Guess what comes next? That’s right:

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