Technorati Basics
If you’re reasonably new to blogging or haven’t ventured far out into the blogosphere, you may find there are many aspects to blogging that seem very foreign to you. One of the things that took me quite a while was understanding technorati.
You may have seen little green buttons like this floating around on blogs you visit.
Technorati basically keeps track of who is talking about who in the blogworld.
The theory is that the more people who “talk” (by linking) about a blog, the more popular that blog is and theoretically the more “important” that blog is.
If you’re not all that interested in blog rankings then you may think Technorati isn’t for you.
BUT, the most important feature of Technorati is the ability to see who has been “talking” about you (by linking to your blog) and others can then see that you have been “talking” about them. If nothing else, it’s actually a bit of fun to be able to see who’s linked to you.
It’s also a nice gesture to those blogs you may link to that DO care about their blog rankings to claim your blog via Technorati so that your links show up.
It’s not all that hard to join Technorati and claim your blog but for any that aren’t sure, I’ll attempt to give you a step by step guide.
SIGNING UP WITH TECHNORATI
Go to the Technorati Homepage and click on “join”.
Simply fill in the details. Make sure you check the box near the bottom that says “I have a blog and would like to claim it now”.
Now there are a few different ways in which you can claim your blog. The easiest way is to go via the quick claim process which uses your password to verify the blog is indeed yours. Now I’m not expert on internet security so I can’t really give you any advise on the safety of doing this. However, Technorati is a well-known and reputable website and you CAN change you password immediately after the process if you wish. I’ll leave that decision up to you.
The other way is to generate some code which you then add to a blog post. Once you’ve done that you can click a button to send the “search spiders” in search of that code on your blog. That verify’s that you are indeed the owner of the blog (based on the assumption that only you can post to your blog).
And that’s pretty much it.
I’M SIGNED UP, NOW WHAT?
Of course, there is plenty more you can do *with* Technorati once you have an account and your blog is claimed.
You can get one of these buttons to put on your blog:
To find one of these buttons for your blog you need to click on the [Edit] button next to your user name when you’ve logged in. This will show up a page called “My Account”. Click the tab labelled “Blog” then down the side are some green tabs. Click “Edit Settings”. Scroll down and you should find a choice of 3 different widgets will the code needed to add them to your blog.
You can check in from time to time (I’d recommend you don’t resort to hourly checks - it can get a little discouraging 
) and see if anyone has been linking to you.
You can see what technorati other blogs have. You can also do blog searches by keywords or tags so if there is a topic that interests you, you can look up other blogs blogging on that topic.
If you want to check out the most popular blogs, you might be interested in Technorati’s Top 100 Blog List.
I’m sure there are other features of Technorati if you want to dig deeper or spend some time looking around.
How much you use Technorati is entirely up to you. But it is a great idea to at least sign up and claim your blog through them.
If you have any problems or questions, feel free to ask. 
Oh, and has anyone else written a blog post on Technorati? I tried searching Technorati as well as a few blogs I read and haven’t come up with anything yet. If you have, could you please send me the URL as it would be great to link to some “further reading” type articles.
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Comments
I did my technorati for my self hosted blogs before I launched etc so I’m not going by personal experience here. BUT, what I would do is simply add the code to the bottom of your latest post with a little note that says “ignore this” before it so your readers don’t get too fussed about it. I can’t see any reason why it would need to be a dedicated post. As far as I understand the technorati spiders (*shudder*) just go looking for the code. Someone correct me if I’m wrong here. That way you don’t have to worry about the post going to feedreaders and the like.
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Ohh cool, Lightening, thanks. This is something that I have on my Blog to do List. Is it better to add the code to a post and then edit the post and delete it, or just put the code in its own post? I was wondering what happens with feed readers etc if you put the code in its own post then delete the post………