One thing I’ve had some difficulty in fully understanding is how the new Technorati tags work. For instance, I’d regard this post as to do with weblogs.
So based on how I understand the system, what I’d do is include this tag:
-==-
The text in red is the key bit. It seems pretty simple, doesn’t it? Yet I just haven’t been able to figure out how it actually works. Indeed, I’ve not included any tag until a post I wrote yesterday about upholding standards in PR – and that was only because Steven Phenix sent me the actual text to insert for the tags to use.
So it’s been a bit of a blank spot. Until now.
In looking through my visitor stats just now (I use StatCounter which gives detailed analyses, far more than TypePad’s stats do), I noticed increasing numbers of visitors coming from Technorati tag links. These visits are to posts I’ve written over the past few weeks, none of which have I explicitly tagged.
Then it dawned on me. The tag system uses the categories you’ve set for your posts – you don’t need to type in specific tags as your categories get tagged anyway.
I go to Technorati’s tag help page – I should have done this before! – and I can see it’s crystal clear:
If your blog software supports categories and RSS/Atom (like Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, Blogware, Radio), just use the included category system and make sure you’re publishing RSS/Atom and we’ll automatically include your posts! Your categories will be read as tags.
If your blog software does not support those things, don’t worry, you can still play. To add your post to a Technorati Tag page, all you have to do is “tag” your post by including a special link (like the one I mentioned above).
So as my blog is a TypePad blog, I need do nothing – the categories I set for each post become the tags. Only if your blog doesn’t support categories (Blogger, for instance) do you need to manually add the tag texts. In all cases, you then need to ensure your post pings Technorati when you publish it (and this is how you do that with TypePad).
How easier could it be?
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
