JNB Web Promotion Internet Marketing and SEO Newsletter

by Ramon Uy  November 30, 2007 edition:

 Tagging Secrets: How to Flood Your Sites with Traffic on Demand

Tagging for Traffic

In order to truly unravel Technorati and other methods of tagging, I had to make a few test blogs and tag the posts. I tried several different methods of tagging my posts until I realized how Technorati was working. Along the way, I discovered the best methods for tagging to bring my sites the most targeted traffic. What I found is if you tag posts without knowing what you’re doing, Technorati will not provide you with much of any traffic. Go figure. You’ll just say, “Technorati doesn’t work” and try something else.

But … if you actually dig though the Technorati site, the search engines and analyze what you did and the results you got, you’ll see how to perfect Technorati tags. And then you’ll realize what a powerful tool tagging is for getting more traffic.
So let’s start off with explaining a few of the concepts leading to Technorati … first I’ll cover social bookmarking and tagging just in case you need a little background information.

Social Bookmarking
You’ve probably heard of social bookmarking before. If you haven’t, it’s not all that complicated. It’s really just a way for users to store their bookmarks online. And here’s why this is becoming hot… Basically, if all your favorite webpages are online; they aren’t limited by the computer you’re on. You can access them from your work or home computer just as easily as a public computer at the library. Also, instead of putting them in folders you create (like the old fashioned way you’re forced to organize things in your Internet Explorer favorites tab), your bookmarks are accessible by tags. That means you can assign a single bookmark to multiple categories (in case you’re like me and forget if your Mambo Templates site was in the CMS Folder or the Blog Folder). If you’re still using your web browser to organize bookmarks, you have to put the bookmark into all the folders it belongs to … which is kind of inefficient. Whereas tagging allows you to do this quickly and easily because all you’re really doing is labeling the page. The bookmarking sites take care of the rest.

Then there’s the social aspect of social bookmarking. These bookmarking services allow other viewers to see your favorites. That way you can share.
Here’s an example displaying the power of this. Over time, if a group of people locate the best resources related to writing a resume and you find their bookmarks, you’ve just saved yourself some time. Most of the work is already done for you.

You don’t have to waste your time looking for quality information related to resumes. All these nice, helpful people who came before you found the best resources already.
You can add your new resources to theirs, but you don’t necessarily need to reinvent the wheel and start from scratch. This way a huge list of quality resources begins to grow.
Isn’t this how searches should work? I think that was the original intention. But the web has become too big. Since search engines have become more about finding the perfect algorithm to automatically classify information rather than focus on what the searchers want (i.e. good, quality sites), many savvy internet users are turning to social bookmarking sites. These savvy users know that a search engine spider can’t always tell a quality site from the garbage.

But these social bookmarking sites can.
They are organized by humans, for humans, which is part of the appeal.
Social bookmarking allows you to easily find new sites, and possibly meet people with common interests. So even if you’re not using social bookmarking as a search tool, rest assured that others are. More and more bookmarking sites are cropping up around the internet and the latest ones that cater to niches. In addition, the most popular of these sites are now showing up very high in the search engine rankings. Which means if you add your link to them, the link to your site will be seen (and hopefully clicked on) by an absolute ton of visitors. Which would you rather do? Search for top ranked sites in your niche and beg the owner to put a link to you in their resources directory (that no one is going to look at by the way). Or spend 5-10 minutes getting a link from a prominent site, right in the midst of the relevant content?

I think you see the point.
Here are a few of the top social bookmarking sites…
BibSonomy
BlogMarks.net
BlogMemes.net
BlogLines.com
Blue.Us
BuddyMarks.com
Connectedy
Complore (Research Collaboration Tool for Researchers)
Del.icio.us
De.lirio.us
Digg
Dohat.com
Fantacular
Favoor (Available in English and German)
Furl 8
GoKoDo MyBookmarks
IndiaGram (Also has a voting system like Digg.com)
Indiamarks (Bookmarking site dedicated to Indian community)
Kaboodle
Ma.gnolia
Reddit
Scuttle
Shadows
Simpy
Spurl
Tutorialism (Bookmarking website for tutorials)
Yahoo! My Web (Available in many languages)
Youtube

Some of these sites will even check the bookmarked links to make sure they are still live. If they aren’t, the bookmark will be removed. The better bookmarking sites will also keep track of all the people who have bookmarked a particular web page and rank it. The page with the most bookmarks will be placed near the top of the list. This is a very valuable feature for you as an internet marketer. Obviously, you want your link near the top of the list!

So social bookmarking is just a way of saving bookmarks to a public website and tagging them with relevant keywords. We’ll spend a little more time on social bookmarking later on. But for now let’s get into the details of tagging…

What is a Tag?
Tagging is the essence of all these social bookmark sites.
Tags provide you with a way to categorize your image, post, or web page. Keywords are virtually always used to organize topics on the internet. Tags are really just more of the same. The users tag a web page or an image with a keyword (or key phrase). By doing so, all the other web pages, posts, and images with the same tag can be organized together. This means you can find things easier. The related information is compiled together for you so you don’t have to search all over for it. So tags aren’t really any different than keywords. Just in case you’re still not sure what I’m talking about, here’s a real simple example. Let’s say you write an article about cell phones. You would use the tag “cell phones” to help categorize it. This is hardly rocket science at all, so please don’t fret over it. Tags equal keywords. Since you’re an internet marketer, I’m sure you already know the importance of keywords and key phrases and how you should go about finding them.
The difference is that organizing information by tags the way some of these innovative sites are doing turns them into more of a browsing tool than a searching tool. Many people find it a little bit messy, but at the same time, that’s what so many like about it. It’s free structure is a breath of fresh air compared to the rigidity of the search engines. Type in the wrong keyword in Google and you’ll just get pages of results related to something you’re not interested in at all. But with tagging, you get to browse through the information. Most of the tagging sites will display a list of related tags for each search you make. This way if you don’t see what you like with your first search, you can keep browsing.

I’ll cover the concept of tagging a little more as we go through a couple of the top tagging sites on the net… namely Furl, Del.icio.us and Flickr.

Furl
Furl is one of the top bookmarking sites on the internet. You will find it at… www.furl.net
Furl boasts it can help you “Find the best sites that real people are saving”. And this truly is the power of social book marking. It’s social proof at its best.
If you need to learn about Hawaii, are you going to want to sift through the results at your favorite search engine where a computer program spits out the most relevant results, or are you going to want to browse what other people just like you thought were the most relevant sites on Hawaii? The most relevant sites get bookmarked the most often. Therefore, they show up nearer the top of a keyword search at Furl. For example, if you’re thinking about traveling in the near future, you can visit Furl and discover the top travel sites on the web according to Furl users. Then you can browse through these until you find what you’re looking for. These social bookmarking sites are only going to become more popular in the future. That’s because they’re on to something…
I trust what other people think is worthwhile. And so do most other people.
We all want referrals for many things in life; like neighborhoods, doctors, realtors, hairdressers, mechanics, you name it… we all feel more comfortable when we’ve been given a referral for something important. And that’s the beauty of social bookmarking. If 15 other people give a site dealing with traveling in Barcelona a thumb’s up, then you’ll be more likely to think it’s worth your time to visit it too. You’ll trust the information you find there more than you would another site. And…If that site is selling something, you may trust it enough to make a purchase from it. I’m hoping since you’re a marketer, the power of these sites will start to become more and more clear to you.

So just how do you use Furl?
Well, with Furl, you need to sign up for an account before you can really see much of anything. Once you’re a member of Furl, you’ll get your own personal archive where you can bookmark to your heart’s content.
If you set your account to public, others will be able to see your bookmarks.
So what you need to do right now is open an account with Furl and start bookmarking your pages. That’s right, the pages that lead straight to your site. You may just have one page and only one site or you may have a network with dozens upon dozens of sites. At the very least, bookmark one page from each of your sites. This will give you a backlink from Furl which will boost the popularity of your site (Furl has a high page rank and is very popular). Since it is a highly trafficked site, the bookmark will hopefully lead to some traffic. Just make sure you tag your bookmarks with appropriate keywords and choose several of them. There’s no reason to limit your tags to just one or two. You may as well come up with all the tags that relate to your site in order to maximize the chances that someone else can find the link you bookmark. One thing to do before you start bookmarking is check out the popular headlines at Furl (I’ll cover this below). Off to the right of the popular headlines, check out the hot topics. If you can work in a tag or two from this list of popular headlines (provided it’s relevant), then you should. It will provide you with much more traffic than a tag that isn’t quite so popular. Health is always a popular topic at Furl. Therefore, if you have a few health related websites, tag each of these with the term “health” as well as a few other specific health tags. Furl will recommend you (and all the other members) new content based on what you’ve bookmarked in the past. That means people who frequently search for info on health are going to be shown the links you tag with the term “health”. With Furl, the more people who have bookmarked a page, the higher up it shows in the results for a key term. So hopefully other Furl members will bookmark your page if they see it provides valuable information.

Furl Features
From within your Furl account, you can view the latest headlines (note; these headlines are just the latest web pages that have been added to the Furl system). They call them headlines, but they’re really just bookmarked sites. Just click on “My Archive” and then “Latest Headlines” from within your Furl account to get to the screenshot below...
The cool thing is they color code the entries with a cool, warm, hot (the most bookmarked sites) color system. This way you can see at a glance what is popular. If you notice, the Google Web Toolkit (it’s coded as the first orange site, which equals a warm site) is ranking fairly high. On the latest headlines page, you will also notice a list of hot topics to the right. By clicking on any of these words, you’ll be taken to a list of recently bookmarked pages within that category, like the one below for entertainment...

This image shows all the most recent bookmarked sites that were tagged, “entertainment”.
Interesting.

But what’s even more interesting is all of these Latest Headline pages include RSS feeds conveniently ready for you to use. Put a topic Furl feed on your site and provide your visitors with fresh new content on auto pilot. The links will go straight to the bookmarked site. They will include the date, a rating, a clipping, and a description if it’s provided. Add real-time features from Furl right to your site!
Moving along with the tabbed features, you can also click on “most popular” and see the popular headlines. This will show you the most bookmarked sites for a given topic…

You can see the most often bookmarked headlines and click on the top related categories over to the right. All these also come complete with RSS feeds. More content for your site.
So again, if you have a few health sites, why not put a feed from Furl on it displaying the most popular health sites? The feed will update the content as it is updated on Furl.
There’s another cool RSS feature that you can use with Furl as well. You can actually create your own custom Furl feed. Just click on “Add Furl to My Site” from under the “My Tools” option.

This tool will provide you with the source code to display all the personal bookmarks you create with Furl. This tool is useful if you have a following of visitors who might be interested in where you get your news and information. Furl for searching You can search Furl by typing in whatever you’re looking for in the search box near the top. You select where you want the results to come from; all sources, archive, Furl, the web.
The search feature is in beta at the time of this writing. Furl is actually owned by LookSmart which is a search engine in and of itself so these results may incorporate some of their existing technology.

A real-time marketer’s goldmine. The real-time updating of Furl makes it a marketers dream. Discover what people are bookmarking (which is a step above what they are just searching for). I’m not sure it’s possible to visit Furl and not come away with at least one good idea for an infoproduct. In addition, you have a virtually unlimited source for adding relevant content to your site now as well and getting some great backlinks. Furl is popular enough that links you can get from it will also result in some free traffic (if you tag it with a popular tag). Traffic that will hopefully lead to sales, adsense clicks, subscribers, or whatever you plan to accomplish with your site. With Furl you can bookmark the pages of sites or blogs. This is also how another one of the web’s popular social bookmarking site works as well…

Del.icio.us
With Del.icio.us you can bookmark anything, whether it’s a webpage or a blog, but it does have some unique features. It is another very popular social bookmarking site that I suggest you start adding your sites to…. www.del.icio.us The image below is the home page to the Del.icio.us site… The upper portion of the image just gives you some basic info on the site. The real action is under the grey bar… The left side of the Del.icio.us home page (under recent) shows the most recently bookmarked sites. The right side of the home page (under popular) shows the most popular tags. Del.icio.us lists a few popular topics, and then shows a few of the latest bookmarks for each tag. These links go right to the website. They are not links to another Del.icio.us web page. So getting your link listed on the home page would bring in a good deal of traffic for you. I’ve not found any information on how they organize the popular links on the home page, but I think it has to do with how many people click thru your site from within their pages. So having a highly optimized title for your page is going to help you get here. For example; “Best Magic Tricks Explained” is on the popular side and I’m betting a lot of this has to do with its descriptive title. Like virtually everything else that has to do with marketing, it all boils down to your copywriting skills. Get people to click on your links by using a descriptive, action oriented, curiosity building title and combine it with technology know-how. This formula will make you golden!
Back to Del.icio.us. While on the home page, you can click on the “see more popular tags” link, and you’ll be taken to a page that looks like this… This page is called a tag cloud. It shows the top tags on the site. The larger the font of the tag, the more popular that tag is. So webdesign is more popular than say… xml (which is at the very end in tiny little letters).

So let’s click on webdesign and see where that takes us…
It takes us to a list of the most recently saved bookmarks that were tagged webdesign. In fact, the top entry was the most recently saved. The order is dependent on how long ago the site was bookmarked. Since this is a really popular tag, the first few bookmarks were saved immediately while the next few show that they were saved just 1 minute ago. This is about as real-time as you can get! You can scroll through the bookmarks and see how many other people saved each one. The more people that saved a particular webpage, the more popular it probably is. You can also choose to sort the saved bookmarks by popularity. Just click on popular up near the top…When you click on popular to sort the bookmarks based on popularity, you’ll see something like this…

The most popular bookmark (Google Web Toolkit) was saved by 1244 other people! Clicking on the link takes you directly to their webpage so you know this Google site is receiving a ton of traffic from their top listing on Del.icio.us. And this is a popular term. It’s a Google site in this example (so we know they’re already receiving a ton of traffic), but many of these other bookmarked web page are just regular sites by regular people.
By the way, did you notice that this Google Web Toolkit site was bookmarked quite a bit on Furl too? I’m not technical enough to know anything about building AJAX apps in the Java language, but since it seems to be a very popular topic with these techies, I bet it’d make a very profitable how-to infoproduct (or service).

So as you can see, just by checking out social bookmarking sites like Furl and Del.icio.us, you can easily learn what people are interested in. If you keep careful watch, you can really hit on something worth creating. At any rate, if you decide to sort your search by popularity, Del.icio.us will break things down by showing you how many people have saved the page (from all time) and how many people have saved it recently. However, the actual search results are sorted by how many people bookmarked the page recently. If you look through the image above, you’ll see that other sites were bookmarked more often, but Google Web Toolkit still beats them out. The Toolkit site has the highest number by the text “recently saved”. Relevance based on recency is a nice feature if you want to see current trends. It also ensures that only updated sites with current information will stay near the top of the popular results listings.
There is yet another interesting feature to Del.icio.us. Click on the highlighted text that says, “saved by 1244 other people” and you will be taken to a page where it actually lists out the users and the user notes.

This page will show you all the people who have bookmarked the page. It also has an extended tag cloud of related terms over to the right. Now at the very bottom of the page is something very interesting. Again, it’s a little, orange RSS button. Click on it and you will see the RSS feed for this page of bookmarks. Just keep scrolling to the end of one of your searches and you’ll find it. You can subscribe to it and …. even add it to your site. Again, how’s that for some unique content? A fresh list of all the sites that are popular for any given topic … hmmm … just imagine the possibilities. And once you put the feed on your site, you don’t even have to lift a finger. Why not put related topic feeds for both Furl and Del.icio.us bookmarks on your content sites? At any rate, you can click on the users name and you will see all the other bookmarks that user has. This will be useful to you if you want to see what people in your niche are looking for (this type of research on your prospects is priceless, it can lead to back-end products and services as well as a better understanding of how to sell to your niche) ...

In this case, this guy is obviously a tech person -- if I wanted to know about any of this tech stuff I’d be interested in his links. It also shows over the right what he or she commonly tags for. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed for his or her personal links!
Using this feature, you can make your own list of useful links and put the feed on your site. Anytime you find more links related to the subject, the feed on your site will update…
Off to the right, Del.icio.us provides you with some related tags. Click on each of these to see similar bookmarks. It’s just a helpful feature that allows visitors to browse through similar tags.

Ideas for Monopolizing on Del.icio.us
Trend-spotting So back to the importance of this as an internet marketer. It’s actually two fold. For one, surely can you see the potential this site has for helping you find trends? It’s actually all right in front of your eyes at the tag cloud page. You can find out what people are looking for right at this very moment! I really can’t visit Furl and Del.icio.us without coming up with a few great ideas and I’m sure you’ll feel the same. Their power as a marketing tool is tremendous. Nothing else is updated as quickly as these real-time social bookmarking sites. You can also see at a glance the most popular sites in your niche. Let’s say you have a site related to webdesign. We know from the page with the bookmarks sorted by popularity that the Google Web Toolkit is the most popular web design page at Del.icio.us. Obviously, Google isn’t going to give you a link, but some of the others owned by real people probably will … so get a link if possible from a few of these ultra popular sites to maximize your link building campaign.
If you are building up a list of related resources at your site, Del.icio.us will be a tremendous help to you. The work’s already done. In fact, you could build up a decent site using nothing but the RSS feeds they are supplying to you.
Getting in the system. Ultimately, you want all of your own sites to be listed in Del.icio.us just like we discussed with Furl. Don’t worry if they aren’t already in there. Just register to become a Del.icio.us member and start bookmarking your own sites to get them going.
It’s kind of like the sub-shop guy down the street who adds a couple of shiny quarters and a dollar bill from his own pocket to the tip jar. Get it started and hopefully others will add money to the jar too.

This is social proof in the works. You start by tagging your own sites and then hope others will follow. “Hey, one person liked this site so far, maybe I should look at it… oh yah, I like it too. Better add this to my Del.icio.us bookmarks”. And so on and so forth.
There are other ways to promote your sites as well. One thing you can do is put an “add this site to Del.icio.us” link right on your site or blog. There are plug-ins that make this a piece of cake to add to wordpress and it isn’t too difficult to add to a regular website either. It’s just a matter of adding in some simple text with a link back to Del.icio.us.
People love to click on links and buttons on your site, so if you add this feature to it, chances are good you’ll get a few people bookmarking your site (which will in turn drive your site higher up in the Del.icio.us listings). I’ll talk more about this later on.
Del.icio.us has a high pagerank, so you will get some pagerank passed on to your site from your bookmarks. But more importantly, you’ll have a link from a very highly trafficked site. That can lead to visitors … you want visitors don’t you?
If you bookmark your site and start getting more and more bookmarks from other users, you can see what they say about your site. You can also search through these comments to find out what people want and like.
Just some research into the top bookmarked sites can give you enough info to make an authority site on virtually any subject. See what these top sites are doing, improve on it and you’ll soon have a winner.Another reason to tag and bookmark your site in Del.icio.us… If you needed another reason for bookmarking your site here, it’s that Yahoo now owns Del.icio.us.

Many SEO experts believe that the way of the search engines is moving toward what they’re starting to call “people rank”. Right now the search engine algorithms are more focused on links from other websites as a measure of popularity. A link from a site equals a popularity vote. But popularity may also be judged by other activities like the number of bookmarks from a social bookmarking site, the number of times it’s “Favorited” on the web browser toolbar, how many people subscribe to a site’s feed through my yahoo or one of the other popular newsreaders, etc…
So each time you get someone new to bookmark your site; it might count as a relevant link. I have no idea whether this is happening now, but I’m sure it will happen eventually.
Google is also getting into the social bookmarking game. They have their own bookmarking site at www.google.com/bookmarks which I suggest you add your site to. You’ll also want to add your sites to all the other social bookmarking sites I listed out for you earlier. As you can imagine, getting all these links from social bookmarking sites can truly affect your rankings in the major search engines. So definitely get your sites bookmarked right now.
The next bookmarking site we’ll cover is used for images only…

Flickr
I can’t describe how exciting Flickr is to photographers around the globe. The ability to share photos to everyone with an internet connection is truly amazing.
But, before you get too excited about Flickr, they pretty much cater to photographs and aren’t real big on other types of images. They explicitly state that they don’t want you to use Flickr for hosting web graphics like logos and banners. They will allow you to upload screenshots and illustrations, but the majority of your images should be photographs.
If you’re not an aspiring photographer how will Flickr benefit you?
The people putting in all these photos get to decide whether they will be public or private. If they allow it to be public, then anyone can leave comments, notes and tags on them. This makes the photos searchable by the tags. The nice thing is, all the photos are tagged, organized and distributed by RSS. Most of the tags have their own feed. If you can’t find the feed, Flickr has a page that describes exactly how to get the feeds of the public photos. You may find this information here…http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/ So now you can put images related to a specific tag (keyword) on your site and it will constantly update. Not a bad idea. If you’re going to use Flickr for your own photographs, you should know that it really isn’t for commercial use. But I’ve seen people frequently put links to their website in their image descriptions. When you sign up for Flickr you will have a chance to write a profile for yourself. You can definitely put links back to your website in your profile.

So if you’re in a niche where images can come in handy, then take some pictures, add them to Flickr, and label them with a link back to your website. You can also use illustrations and screenshots, but the majority of your account should have photographs (and remember, these must be yours).I have also seen people put their website url in as their name. This way your website url shows up everywhere your name would be. It doesn’t link back, but you get the picture. So I’d suggest you open your accounts and start tagging your sites with Furl and Del.icio.us. You should also tag any images you may have with Flickr because these sites are promoted much further than you might realize … for starters, certain links and images will also show up on Technorati… which is a real powerhouse in the tagging scene.

What is Technorati?
Technorati is an interconnected, personalized world for reading your favorite blogs. It’s not really an RSS aggregator. Instead it attempts to create an environment where visitors can get a connection with the blogs they like.
At the time of this writing, Technorati is currently tracking 38.9 million sites and 6.8 million tags (that’s 6.8 million different keywords and keyphrases). So that’s a lot of information … and despite the sheer volume of information, it’s organized fairly well.
Technorati is basically a search engine created for searching blogs.

Here’s a quick summary of how Technorati works:
1. Bloggers add tags to their posts that help categorize them…
2. All the posts with the same tag are grouped together on a tag page…
3. Technorati then pulls in information from other tagged sources…
The end result is a display of different kinds of content (links, posts, images) all grouped together by tag (keyword).
And here’s where tagging and bookmarking your sites and images like I explained in the last section really pays off….Technorati takes tagged photos from Flickr, links tagged from Furl, and adds in the tagged posts written by bloggers. All this information gets organized on a page. This page has all the stuff related to your topic of choice. And here’s the kicker: it’s all updated in real-time.

Searching Technorati is fun because of the way it is organized. It’s different than the cold experience you get using the search engines. It’s not one where a Ph.D. (not that I have anything against them), controls the results you see by using a complex algorithm.
People use the internet; therefore, it makes sense that people want people to organize the content for them. And that’s why Technorati is becoming more popular.
It’s more about browsing through content than searching for it.
Which would you rather do? Searching seems more like work to me. And we all know how the big boys of search rank the results in order of what they think is most important… which isn’t always what you want. What about the new sites? They never even make a peak. In that regard, Google and Yahoo are missing out – and savvy internet users are starting to see that. The web is cutting edge. Should the same results be shown quarter after quarter after quarter when we all know over millions of pages are being indexed per year? Probably not. And that’s why the people at Technorati are onto something.

With Technorati, you just click a word and away you go. Each page reads more like content (with links to different sources) then merely search results. The creators of Technorati have created their search results with a “This Just In” feel in mind.
It’s newsy. For example, let’s say you want to learn about dog training. You search for dog training at Technorati and a list of blog posts or articles that mention dog training pop-up. So how does Technorati decide how to rank the results? Well, it’s quite simple; the results are listed by recency. The most recent blog posts or articles come up first and the older posts come up last. It’s that simple. No search engine optimization is necessary … Let me show you how easy it is to get your posts to show up at Technorati…

Blog posts to Technorati - As you’re probably realizing by now, the main feature of Technorati is its ability to keep up with the blogging community. Snippets of blog posts organized by tag (or keyword, however you want to refer to it) is its main feature.
So let’s get back to ensuring your blog posts are included in this popular site. There are actually three different methods for getting your posts in Technorati. These include…
1. Automatically through your blog. Most blogs that support categories and use RSS/Atom feeds will be indexed (provided you ping Technorati). Wordpress, TypePad, Blogware and Moveable Type are a few popular blogging platforms that work automatically because they allow you to have categories. In this case, the tags that will be used are the blog categories. So if your blog on California has the categories; “surfing”, “palm trees”, and “beaches”, all the posts you put in the “surfing” category will be tagged as surfing. All those put in the “palm trees” categories will be tagged as a post about palm trees. When you search for information related to palm trees at Technorati, your post will show up under the tag: palm trees. Since the results are organized by recency, your palm trees post will be post number 1 until a new post discussing palm trees is made.
2. Manually tag your posts. For more control over where your posts show up, you can tag each of the individual posts by including a special link in the body of the post…
a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]" rel="tag">[tagname]</a>
In the link example above, [tagname] should be substituted for whatever tag you want to use as the tag.

So if you want your post to show up on the dog training page, you would tag it like this…
a href="http://technorati.com/tag/dog+training" rel="tag">Dog Training</a>
You will now have a link from your post back to the dog training page at Technorati.
You may sprinkle these tags within the text of your post or you can put them at the bottom of your post like this…Technorati tags: dog training
I would suggest putting the links near the bottom if you want to keep people on your pages. My research has shown that people are less likely to click thru these links (thus leaving your site) if you put them at the bottom of your post. Many people will realize that the tags at the bottom help you categorize your site and they won’t click on them. But if you sprinkle them throughout your post, they may think it will take them somewhere good and click right on it. Once they do they will be taken to a Technorati page related to the topic of interest and may forget all about you and your site. If you use a blog that supports categories and tag the individual posts, then each post will show up in the category tag and the individual tag you put in your post. Here’s an example. Let’s say you have a wordpress blog about dogs. You have a few dog related categories set up and one of them is dog training. You write a post about training for a particular breed (let’s say German Shepherds) so you add in a German Shepherd tag. That post will be tagged for dog training (since that is the category it’s in) and German Shepherd. So the same post will show up in two categories in Technorati.

Like I mentioned earlier, with this method, you will have a link back to the Technorati tag page. Some people don’t like to link out (because visitors may click off their page). Here’s a way around this…
3. Link to any directory web page you want.
Technorati will still index your post and include it in their search results even if you don’t link to them. You will have to link somewhere, but the link can go to your own site or another one as long as you follow their rules for tagging. The only rules are to make sure the URL you link to is a directory (http://www.yourdomain.com/anydirectory/) and you include the command: rel="tag directory" or rel="tag" (this part tells Technorati that this is a tag you want applied to your blog)…
Here are a few examples…
<a href="http://apple.com/ipod" rel="tag">iPod</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity" rel="tag">Gravity</a>
<a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/chihuahua" rel="tag">Chihuahua</a>
<a href="http://dmoz.org/Arts/Movies/" rel="tag directory">Movies</a>
<a href="http://dir.yahoo.com/Recreation/Travel/" rel="tag directory">Travel</a>
And remember, you can even link back to your own site if you want to keep all the traffic on your pages.
Once you’ve tagged your post properly and published it, all you have left to do is just ping Technorati. Here is the page to ping directly…
http://www.technorati.com/ping/

You can also have your blog software ping for you (they explain how to do this on the Technorati ping link above). If you’re a wordpress user, it’s as simple as adding Technorati in your list of sites to ping.
Once you've tagged your blog with any of the 3 methods above, your blog post should be listed in Technorati under the key words or phrases you’ve tagged for in a few minutes (they say it may take up to an hour during busy periods).
Just in case you were wondering, in the Technorati directions, it states that you may list up to 20 tags within your blog post. Just make sure the tags you use are actually relevant to what you have written about in your post. By using as many relevant tags as you can, your post will show up in many different searches and increase the number of visitors who click through it. Troubleshooting Technorati, like anything else, isn’t always perfect. There may be times when your blog posts don’t show up. There are a couple of mistakes I’ve made that I’ll share. Knowing the things to avoid will help you keep your blog posts showing up on Technorati. First, don’t claim your blog under one account, and then delete it and move it to another (yes, you can have more than one Technorati account and I’ll explain what these are good for in just a few pages). I did this and I’m still not sure that blog is being indexed correctly. Secondly, don’t go tag crazy. Technorati may flag spam. So if you write a 500 word post and tag it with 50 or even 500 words and phrases, they may stop indexing your blog altogether. Somewhere on the Technorati site it states that you can use up to 20 tags. So make sure you don’t go over that limit. I wouldn’t even advise using 20 tags unless you really have a long post that actually covers all the topics you are tagging for.

In order for all the tagging you will do on your blog to work right, you need to make sure Technorati can index your blog well.
Make sure to check the first few posts you make to ensure they are being added to Technorati. If they aren’t, there are a few things you can try.
First off, try to validate your site. Use the W3C Markup Validation Service. It’s a free service that checks HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations. This is just a standard that ensures everything checks out and is useable. You can use this free service here for this…http://validator.w3.org/ You can also try validating your feed with Feed Validator… http://feedvalidator.org/ This free service checks RSS 0.90-2.0 and Atom feeds to make sure they can be read correctly. Also, make sure you are pinging Technorati to let them know you have updated your blog.
If after all this, you’re still having problems, try contacting Technorati. I had a problem with one of my wordpress blogs getting indexed. It took a few days, but after contacting them, they finally fixed the problem.
So now let’s cover what goes on over at Technorati and how the information is organized so you can really maximize your tagging…

A Technorati Overview
There are a few navigation bars in the Technorati website. But the most important one is the top bar. It has a search field and above it are the words, “Search”, “Tags”, “Blog Finder”, and “Explore”.
Let’s go through each of these four options using dog training as the search example…

Search
Here’s our search for dog training…
You’ll notice when you use the search feature at Technorati, it returns all the posts with the words dog and training in the results. The search feature will return all the posts from any blog indexed in Technorati with those words within them, even if they are not tagged. So this type of search returns the most results.
With Technorati, it’s all about how recently you post. If you want to rank high for “dog training”, you will if you’re one of the most recent posts. It doesn’t matter if your post is

the most highly optimized post for the words dog training or not. But as other posts with those words in them come in (whether or not they are tagged), they’ll start pushing yours down. So that means even if your post has the title “Dog Training” and the words strung together within the post several times, if another post comes through with those two words in it (even if they aren’t together), you’ll be moving down in rank. Easy come, easy go.
Search gives you a really broad view of things and really isn’t that great of a tool to use. This is especially true if you’re typing in a phrase since the words don’t even need to show up together.
So let’s move on the second search tool, tags…

Tags
Tags are where the real power of Technorati is at. Tag searches are more specific than regular searches at Technorati.
If you’re using the tags feature to search Technorati, only posts made with the actual tag get picked up. That means only posts the author wrote and then put into a category on their blog or purposefully tagged will show up here. So if you search Technorati for

terms you know you made a post on, but did not tag, your post will not be returned in their tag results. You will notice if you play around with the Technorati tag search that many popular phrases you type in will show a “Sorry, no posts are tagged”. This means no one has ever tagged that phrase yet in Technorati. This is a golden opportunity for you. Start tagging for these terms right away!
On the flip side, some of the more popular tags like “Google” return a huge number of results. So many that you’ll be bumped off the first page in one hour!
Therefore, you don’t want to use vague keywords as your tags in Technorati. If you do, your content (and the link back to your site) will be lost in the sea of posts. You may get a surge of traffic, but then it will trail off as your site moves down the list. Use more specific keywords to stay on page one of the tag results longer.
For example; dog would not be a good word to tag. As I look through Technorati right now, a tag search for “dog” shows that the last post on the page was made 1 hour ago. For a search like this, you’ll be off the first page within one hour of posting! Plus who knows what people searching for dog are really after. These aren’t going to be targeted visitors.
Even dog training might not be a good keyword to tag. Yep, just checked and the last post on the first page was made 2 hours ago. So it’s not much better.
But puppy potty training probably is.

If you’ll notice, the first post with this tag was made 18 days ago. The next one was made 260 days ago. You can write a post about puppy potty training (and make sure you tag it as such) and you’ll stay on this first page (near the top even) for a long time before somebody ever bumps you off. The downside is, far fewer people will visit this page then the dog training page. But, you’ll receive steady traffic from a tag like this even if it’s only a small trickle. Technorati is getting just as big as anything else, so you need to do your keyword research. But as large as it is, you don’t need to cater to obscure keywords to get some decent traffic. I bet the blogs listed on the puppy potty training tag page get some traffic from this Technorati link (and later on I’ll expand on this more).

For certain tags, you can have ALL the listings (if you just write a few posts and tag them all with your keyphrase). And remember, you can invent tags. You aren’t limited to what has been tagged for in the past. Your tag can be anything you want.
At any rate, if you have all the listings for any given tag, the chances of a visitor clicking on one of your links is more likely (it still won’t be 100% because Technorati includes ads, etc… and some people will click the back button). When you perform a tag search, you’ll notice that the search results include blog posts, images, and links. I’ll talk about those features a little more… knowing this will help you really dominant a Technorati tag page (which can get you much more traffic than just die-hard Technorati searchers as you’ll soon see)…
Images
You’ll notice there are images on many of the Technorati pages. Currently, these images come from Flickr and from a lesser degree, Buzznet.
These are two online photo sharing sites. All you need to do is join these sites and post your images as public. Tag your images for the keyword(s) you want your images shown

under. Then presto, your images will show up on Technorati for your tag. In the example above, the images were tagged “dog training”.
The images link back to Flickr and Buzznet, they do not lead directly to your site, but remember, you can put a link back to it in your profile. You won’t get a lot of traffic from your images, but it may help (plus you only have to tag them once and then leave them).

Links
The links (near the bottom) on many of the Technorati pages come from Furl.
It’s really as simple as joining Furl, bookmarking some links, and tagging them with appropriate keywords. They’ll show up on Technorati for your tag. The nice thing is, these links will lead straight to your webpage … they completely bypass Furl. So you get another link that leads directly to your site.

I hope you are starting to see how you can completely dominate a Technorati tag page. You can get your images, your blog posts, and your links (and these don’t have to be links to blogs, just web pages in general) all showing up under a particular tag.
By doing this, you will get traffic from people browsing around at Technorati from your tagging efforts. Technorati receives an enormous amount of traffic. I’ll explain why later.
For now, let’s move on to the third tool, the blog finder…

Blog Finder
This search tool finds all the blogs that have been tagged with the term you typed in the search form (with Technorati, you get the chance to tag your posts and your blog). In our example below, we used the blog finder to look for blogs about dog training.
The links to the blogs that show up have been tagged with the phrase “dog training”.
For many key phrases, you will find no blogs whatsoever or just a few. This is also a golden opportunity for you.

When using blog finder to search, you will notice there is an option to sort the blogs that appear by authority or by most recently updated. Obviously, if you sort by the most recently updated, you will get the most recently updated blog tagged for dog training. If you sort the blogs by authority, then the one with the most links will be ranked higher.
Technorati ranks the blogs by the number of sites that link to them. Under each blog, you will see the green text that states the total number of links from the total number of sites sites. It doesn’t matter if you have 500 links from 3 sites, you will still be ranked as though you have 3 links from different sites. Your blog will be listed between the blogs with links from 4 and 2 sites irrelevant of how many links you have per site.
Claiming your blog So, how do you get your blog to show up under a blog finder search? You just need to claim your blog and then tag it with representative tags. The simple instructions for claiming your blog may be found here…
http://www.technorati.com/help/#membership You will need to register an account at Technorati and follow their directions. They mainly consist of entering your blog’s URL and then either adding in a line of code to your blog or supplying them with the username and password for your blog’s admin.
Once you’ve claimed your blog, Technorati will ask you to come up with a few tags to help describe it. Do some keyword research in order to come up with popular tags and add in as many as you can (there is a 20 tag limit). Each time someone types in your tag and clicks on blog finder, your blog will be shown. This is a great way to get some extra traffic (and extra links to your site). For example, if you claim your blog and tag it “dog training”, it will show up any time someone searches for dog training using the blog finder tool.

One other note to mention is that you may claim a subdomain. I’ve tried it and it definitely works. So claim everything you can (well, provided it’s yours).

Explore
If you search under explore, you will see a page that shows what the blogs about dog training are talking about right now. This means only the claimed blogs that have been tagged as a blog about dog training will show up here This section returns results only from blogs that are claimed.

So this tool is similar to the blog finder tool, but instead of just showing a link to your blog, it provides links to the most recent posts those claimed blogs have made.
A little can turn into a lot Hopefully you see how important it is to research your keywords before you start tagging anything. You need to find a mix of popular tags and more specific tags. Once you get some tags figured out, you need to bookmark your pages in Furl and Del.icio.us, your images in Flickr (if you have any), claim your blog in Technorati, and start tagging your blog posts.If you do the proper research and find several tags for categorizing your pages, your blog and your posts, then just doing what I stated above will give you links from literally 100’s of different pages. And these are not pages from a site buried away in the search engines. These are highly trafficked sites. You will have solid links from high authority sites. You will also gain some traffic because a number of people visit Technorati to search each and every day. But there are also a ton of people who wind up on a Technorati page who don’t usually use it to search.
How can that be? It’s because the giant’s of search include Technorati (and even some of the social bookmarking sites) right into their search results…

Technorati in Search Engine Results
Like I alluded to previously…
Google, Yahoo and MSN incorporate Technorati’s tag pages into their search results. This is why Technorati receives so much traffic. Even if you don’t use it for searching, you might actually wind up on one of its pages if you use one of the big search engines.
I’ve only seen the tag pages indexed in the search engines at this point (never the search, blogs, or explore sections). Nonetheless, would you like a page with links to your site listed right up top in Google, Yahoo, or MSN?
Of course you would! I’ve seen some Technorati tag links in the number 1 spot of the search engines. I’ve even noticed times when the Technorati tag page for a specific product ranks higher than the product site itself (even when the site had the exact phrase in the domain url and the exact title, and I’m sure tons of links pointing back to it using the exact anchor text). This is evidence of the power of Technorati.
To try it out, search for something as popular as iPod. At the time of this writing, a link to Technorati’s iPod tag comes up number 9 on Yahoo. The same link shows up on Google too (it’s just near the bottom of the second page).

When you consider how popular iPod’s are these days, this is truly amazing.
If you search for wordpress (how’d you like a high ranking for that term?) the Technorati tag page shows up #3 in Yahoo.
I’ve noticed that sometimes two Technorati tag results pages show up – one says “tag” the other “tags”. You can see in the screenshot above that #3 is the /tag/ listing and #5 is the /tags/ listing. They usually show the same results.
I’m not sure why this is, but in these cases I guess you’ll have two high ranking pages with links back to your site for the price of one. I just consider it a bonus.
I should point out that any search engine results listings you can get from one of the major search engines (from Technorati) will lead to the page in Technorati with your blurb (and a link back to your site). So it’s not a direct link to your site, but this is a quick way to get a rush of free traffic (especially if you know how to write good, descriptive copy).

The longer your post stays at the top of a popular Technorati tag, the more traffic you will receive. You can’t control how long your post stays at the top, but you can just keep posting with new content related to a particular tag.
Here’s how it works. People will search for the tag (whatever it is) on a major search engine. They decide to click on the Technorati tag results page. They see all your posts with well written titles that entice them to click through. You get tons of free traffic.
It’s that easy. There are many other terms where I have seen a link to a Technorati tag page near the top of Google (the search engine powerhouse) … in many cases, it’s been number 1. So there’s no doubt, Technorati is powerful.
How high the Technorati tag page ranks in the search engine results depends on several factors. It depends in part on how competitive the term is and how many people have tagged their posts by linking back to Technorati. That’s essentially what you’re doing every time you tag a post. Let me explain further…If you’ve ever heard the term “link bait”, the creators of Technorati have completely mastered it. Link bait is where you as an owner of a web site come up with a way to get others to link to you.
Technorati’s tagging system is a masterful spin on link baiting. All the blog posts that tag directly to Technorati are giving them a boost in link popularity. Best of all, all the links have the absolute best anchor text possible … the exact keyword or keyphrase they

want to rank highly for. It’s pretty smart. And this is in part how they can achieve such high rankings for such competitive key phrases.
Now not all tag pages show up in the search engines. If there is only one blog tagging for a keyword or phrase, then the Technorati tag page will not rank well (it is only linked to from one blog) if this is a competitive phrase.
The search engines like the tags that are more popular. This is due to the fact that all the blogs tagging a key word or phrase are passing on their page rank to the Technorati page.
So here’s a hint. If you want to really dominate a Technorati page, then create a few blogger blogs and tag that keyword throughout the posts (use relevant content of course).
More on the search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN don’t just stop at showing you a tagged page when you search for the exact tag. They will even pick up the regular words in the post (not just the tagged keywords).
The link back to Technorati will be for the page that comes up when you search for the tag your post is categorized under. Just give me a minute to explain…
Let’s say you write a post that’s about “puppy potty training”. You don’t tag the words puppy potty training. Instead, you use the following tag to help describe the post; “dog training”. Your listing in the search engines will appear with the title “Technorati Tag: dog training”.

The search engine will provide a description from your post which will include the words “Puppy Potty Training” in bold. You may also see a little blurb from someone else’s post mixed in with your description on the search engine as well (because the page in Technorati with your post is not just dedicated to you and you alone). When you click on the link provided by the search engines, you will be taken to a Technorati search results page that is essentially what you would have seen if you went to Technorati and typed in the tag yourself. In this case, “dog training”. You will be put right at the top of this tag page. So what that means is a user will be taken to a page with a whole bunch of blog snippets. The heading of the page will say “Tags: dog training”. Now, the problem is; you have to compete with all these other blog snippets to get the user to click on the link back to your blog. In many cases, this won’t happen. For one, as you already know, Technorati organizes the results by how long ago the post was made. That means the first one isn’t always the most relevant, but the most recent. So if you made your post on puppy potty training with a tag for dog training, after time, it will be nowhere near the top of Technorati under the heading dog training (because this is a huge category that is posted to very often). Eventually, your post will be pushed back to the 10th page or more.
If you want to see this in action, just go to Technorati and do a search for the word Google. As I type this, the first result is a post that was made 18 minutes ago; the second 38 minutes ago, the third was made 40 minutes ago as so on. The listing at the bottom of the search results page was made only 2 hours ago. There must be hundreds if not thousands of pages in the results for Google. So you don’t want to only pick words like this to tag.

What’s going to happen is the visitor using the search engine will get to the page with all the dog training blog snippets and Technorati’s advertising and they’ll scan the page for puppy potty training. They won’t find it (or if they do, it won’t be a link to your blog, but rather, someone else who just published a post about it) so it won’t do you a bit of good.
So here’s a tip. Don’t just use Technorati tags for broad words that thousands (if not more) people are tagging. This is the same exact type of thing you already know about the search engines. You probably already realize you don’t want to only create pages on your website about “dog training” because there are about 3,000,000,000 other websites in Google that use the word dog training in their page too. You’re going to get buried. You’d be better off selecting at least some keywords that are less competitive.
So don’t only tag for words that tons of other people are going to tag with. If you do, your post will just get buried throughout the span of a day because other people are just going to keep posting on that topic too. You’re going to move down the list as your post ages.
Remember, each post you write can include as many as 20 tags. So if you want to pick a couple of heavily searched, super popular tags, that’s fine, but pick some that are a little more specific as well.

Here are a few tips:
1. Use brand names. The Technorati tag page will wind up at the top of the search engines (because of Technorati’s pulling power) and you may be the only one using the tag. This is great for earning money with affiliate programs.
2. Use WordTracker or your favorite keyword research tool and find some highly searched terms (phrases with 2 or 3 words usually work best).

Not only do Technorati results show up high in the 3 major search engines, but so can Furl, Flickr and Del.icio.us tag pages. Just imagine if you have tags in all these sites linking back to you? You’re going to get some traffic, especially if the keyword(s) is searched for often.

Technorati as a Market Research Tool
Technorati can provide you with a quick and easy way to gauge the popularity of any niche product or service. The tag cloud shows what people are using Technorati search for.
Using Technorati to find trends Technorati is becoming an unbelievable resource for the marketer. Of course, you’ve probably read by now how using Amazon, Ebay and even Yahoo are great ways to get ideas for what to market to people… and they are. But Technorati is a great resource as well. Here’s how…

The Graphs
Technorati is big on graphing the popularity of the tags (keywords and keyphrases). The graphs I’m talking about here are just on the left sidebar of the results pages (whether it’s a search, tags, blog finder, or explore page). Here’s a handy way to use Technorati for conducting market research. Type in a keyword or keyphrase in the search field. In this example, I’m going to use the tag, “ipod”. The first thing we’ll do is look for ipod using the Search feature. This graph tells you how many posts mention the word ipod over the last 30 days.

This graph shows that about 5,000 posts a day contain the word ipod within them. The word ipod isn’t always tagged, but it’s at least mentioned. That’s quite a few mentions.
If you then switch over to the tags viewer, you see a graph like this… The following graph shows how many posts actually tagged the word “ipod” per day. And remember, it’s the tag pages that rank well in the search engines and get the most traffic. You can use these graphs to see the competition in your niche. The fewer the posts that mention your tag, the easier it will be for you to get noticed. Start writing some posts dealing with ipods and you’ll surely get to the top of the list when people search for this tag or find it through the search engines. On the flip side of this, remember, these tag graphs show how often the word is talked about by bloggers. If you are selling to bloggers, can you see how powerful this information is?
Hint… if you can start creating a list of bloggers, you can go through Technorati and find out what they are talking about and possibly, what they may want to buy.
The graphs are only shown on the search and tag search tools.

Here’s another example…
I typed antioxidants into the search feature and here’s the graph…
So that’s about 80 or so posts per day that mention “antioxidants”. So it’s blogged about fairly consistently. But, under the tag feature, you can see that hardly anyone who blogs about antioxidants uses the tag. Here’s the evidence…
Less than one post a day is tagged “antioxidants” over at Technorati. So if you write one post even just a couple times a week, you’ll soon have most of the antioxidants tag page filled with your posts. That means anytime anyone lands on the antioxidant tag page, you’ll have it completely dominated.
I mentioned this earlier, but I’ll say it again… you are not limited by the tags currently on Technorati. You get the opportunity to create your own. So be creative.

Top 100 Blogs
There’s even more marketing gold at Technorati.
You can find a link to the top 100 blogs at Technorati on their home page. You may find it directly by clicking here…
http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs/

Unique Links
These blogs are listed in order from the most unique links in the last six months. Technorati doesn’t just want popular, they want blogs that are currently popularity. Here today, gone tomorrow is the saying that comes to mind. They want trends. Therefore, you can have 50,000 links, but if they weren’t linked to you in the last six months, you may not be in the top spot. At the time of this writing, the top blog has 45,000 links from 28,000 sites. The second top blog has 66,000 links from 20,000 sites. So these are pretty major sites. You can learn an incredible amount just by reading these top blogs. See if they do anything special to help get all these links. Some popular blogs will have created a useful tool that everyone else wants to link to. Or they’ll just have superb content on hot topics … and lots of it. What do these blogs deal with? Obviously, it’s a popular subject to get that many links. If you start covering it in your blog, you may be able to get some of their traffic.
If you click on one of the top blog links, you’ll get a ton of useful information about that blog. I’ve clicked on one of the top blogs (Boing Boing) at the time of my search…

At a glance, Technorati will give you some vital stats on this top blog. You can learn what its top tag is (which for this example is Video), see a traffic history from Alexa, and learn how many posts the author makes per day. In this case you can see how some days the author writes as many as 100 posts, but there are others where it’s only about 5 or so. You can also see what the blog tags are for Boing Boing. The selection of tags helps them get traffic, so why not follow along in their footsteps?
You can also see how many people “favorited” this blog…

Most Favorited
Favoriting a blog at Technorati means you add it to your list of favorite blogs. Again, for those of you who are marketing savvy, this is social proof at work. If a blog is popular (as shown by the number of members of “favorite” it), chances are good, others will assume it’s full of great content and start religiously visiting it as well.

So you can look through to see which blogs are the most favorited to use these blogs as a model for your own. I’m not suggesting you copy anything, but by looking at the most favorited blogs at Technorati, you can learn what type of content people want to read, the tone, style of blog, and if there’s anything special these blogs are doing.
You can find the “most favorited” blogs by visiting the top 100 and click on “Most Favorited”. If you visit the top 3 “Most Favorited” blogs on this list, you’ll see that each of the blogs has a nice, little icon that says, “Add us to technorati favorites”. You should add this icon to your blog too. It’s a quick, easy way to help promote your blog. And it obviously paid off for these folks. I’ll talk more about later.

Interestingly, the top blog has 462 people who have made it a favorite. Hmmm, that’s not too many really if you think about it. The 100th blog only has 31 people who’ve made it a favorite. Each time a member logs into their account, Technorati will show them posts from their favorite blogs. So getting more people to add you to their favorites is a good way to start growing a captive audience. When you claim your blog, you will need to become a member of Technorati. This will also give you the opportunity to add blogs into your favorites section. You should add all your blogs to your favorites (after all, they are, right?).
Top searches and tags
Find out what people are searching for right now and then post about it. Use the Top Searches this hour feature which you can find right here…
http://www.technorati.com/search/ Here are the top searches the hour I happened to take this screenshot…
I think it must be the day of or the night before the finale of the popular TV show, “American Idol”.Does this tag fit into any of your blogs or niches? Can you somehow relate it to your content? If so, write about it ASAP and you’ll see a surge of traffic (please don’t spam though, work it in if possible).Writing about the hot topics will get you some traffic. It will also ensure you are writing about something of interest to searchers. But this traffic won’t mean anything if you can’t convert it into sales or adsense clicks (whatever you are seeking). If you can tie a hot topic into your niche somehow, then you will receive a surge of targeted traffic. You will need to come up with a title that is meaningful to your niche in order to get targeted traffic. Obviously, an “I Love Video”, is going to get you a surge of random traffic from people interested in video. What good will that do you? These visitors could range from perverts to amateurs with camcorders (I’m guessing mostly perverts). If you are selling a how-to course on how to put video on your website, you’ll do better with a title like, “10 Internet Marketing Video Secrets to Increase Your Conversions”. This will keep the perverts away and hopefully strike a cord with the people who are really interested in what you have to offer. After all, you’re not paying for these clicks with a dollar amount, but each post you write does cost you in time.
There is also a “hot tags this hour” feature as well. You may find it here…
http://www.technorati.com/tags/

The hot tags this hour are shown in the green area while the top 100 tags are shown below. Add these tags to your niche list and start writing related posts.
I use the hot searches and hot tags technique to find out what the top searches and tags are, publish a post (which immediately gets sent to Technorati), and get some targeted traffic. Some tags are searched for all the time. Just write an interesting tidbit about video or whatever your popular tag is each and everyday. You’ll start getting traffic like crazy.Just keep sending new tagged posts to Technorati.

Here’s what I would do if I were selling a how-to course or even a service on how to put video on your website. First, I’d look around Technorati and see what tags exist and if any top 100 blogs discuss video. I’d collect these popular tags.
Video, technology, marketing, and internet are a few hot tags. These are general, but they’re the types of tags your prospects might look for when they visit Technorati. We know Boing Boing likes to blog about video and they are incredibly popular. They also tag their blog with internet, technology so these words are definitely going into the tag collection. If you look through more of the top blogs, you’ll find a few others somewhat related to your topic. For example, Business Opportunities Weblog: How Much is My Blog Worth is number 10. They deal with marketing (which relates too) so let’s see what their top tags are…Entrepreneurial lifestyle, sales, work at home … these are other popular tags you can start incorporating into your posts. Just keep compiling a list. Go to wordtracker and see if you can find some other great terms to use as tags. Having a diverse list with general,

popular tags and precise, more specific tags is the way to go. You’ll get the best of both worlds with this tactic.
You will receive spurts of traffic when your post with popular tags moves to the top and a steady stream of traffic from the less blogged about, specialized terms. Remember, you can select up to 20 tags per post. That’s 20 different tag pages your single post will show up on. Also remember, these post tags don’t have to be the same tags you use for categorizing your blog.
The beauty of Technorati is since it organizes by recency, you can get to the top for even the most popular tag pages without hardly trying. Just write a post around the topic, tag it, and you’re set. If it’s a hot tag, your post will get a lot of views even though it will be bumped from the top very soon. If it’s a more specific tag, it will stay at the top and you’ll get a steady stream of traffic over a long period of time. It’s possible for it to stay there for months. So combine both the hot tags and the less searched tags to get surges as well as some steady traffic to your blog. Once you get a collection of tags, just start writing short posts that you can use to pull visitors from Technorati over to your blog. Make sure you show off your product at your blog and have a sign-up to collect their email addresses. If you just want clicks, be sure to put adsense in the best spots on your blog (and really, you should collect their email if possible to keep sending them back to your blog with the adsense). Looking for just one click is a little wasteful.

Extras For Your Blog
At this point you should have all your sites and blogs bookmarked all over the internet. But you don’t want to stop there. You want more people to put you in their “favorites” in Technorati as well as the other social bookmarking sites.
Every “my favorite” vote you can get counts. Every link in a social bookmarking site counts. Like I mentioned earlier, many search engine experts are saying that every person you can get to subscribe to your feed may help your rankings, it’s the same with all this stuff I’ve been covering for you. Each link back to a social bookmarking site is a vote for your site. Besides, it will also help move your site up in the rankings at each of the social bookmarking sites (which do get a decent amount of traffic in their own right). This will only increase your visitors and if they’ve added you to their favorite, chances are they will remember your site and keep coming back to visit.
So make your blog (and even your sites) more robust by adding in extras. People love to click on things. If you provide them with an easy way to add your blog to their Technorati favorites, or bookmark your site in Furl or Del.icio.us, you only stand to generate even more traffic.
I like wordpress (and so does the rest of the internet marketing world it seems). People have developed a ton of free plug-ins that make it a snap to customize.
So if you’re using wordpress, here’s what you should add…

Sociable
This is a wordpress plugin that automatically adds links on your posts to the popular social bookmarking sites. This plugin has a ton of these bookmarking sites added to it, so
many that I usually take some of them out (which is easy to do under Options in your wordpress admin – a Sociable link appears where you can customize the plugin).
Here is where you can find it…. http://push.cx/sociable Under each blog post, it will allow the reader to click on an image to add the post to any number of social bookmarking sites you select. I usually set it up to add to delicious, furl, spurl, dig, blogroll. Those are the five I always include although I believe the plug-in comes with around 25 or so social bookmarking sites.
Del.icio.us – Bookmark this! WordPress plugin
Easily add a “Bookmark this page on del.icio.us” link. You can add the link to your posts or in the sidebar. It will update for whatever page your visitor wants to bookmark (not just your homepage) and it even puts the description right into their del.icio.us bookmark automatically. All they have to do is tag it.
Here’s a link to find this plugin…
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/21/delicious-bookmark-this-wordpress-plugin
Add this blog to my Technorati Favorites
Add this image along with the link to your sidebar. This will allow visitors toyou’re your site to their Technorati favorites with a simply click. The link is…
http://technorati.com/faves?add=http://www.yourdomain.com

Subscribe me
If you’ve not already done so, you need to start adding tiles with subscribe buttons. Allow people to subscribe to your feed with one of the popular feedreaders. Hardly anyone knows what RSS is, but they do know what the “Add to My Yahoo” button does. Put these buttons on your site with this handy plugin…
http://www.semiologic.com/software/subscribe-me/

Checklist for Traffic
I. Tags
1. Spend some time performing keyword research (I like Wordtracker) and find out what keywords people commonly use to search your niche. Write down 40 or so keywords (or keyphrases) that describe your blog and the information you plan to write about in your posts. Keep a list of these keywords under the heading “specific tags”. Over time, you will write posts around these tags (and you may use them as tags to help you label your blog or site).
The best keywords are those that are searched often, but are not incredibly competitive. Wordtracker and many other sites that charge a fee have excellent tools for finding these keywords. You can also use the free Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool.
2. Look through the tag clouds at Del.icio.us and Technorati and find some of the really popular tags (be sure you don’t just get all your tag ideas from tag clouds or your sites, blogs and posts will get buried). Keep a list of these popular tags under the heading “popular tags”.
3. Look through the top 100 blogs at Technorati and find some commonly used tags related to your niche. Write down any ideas for tags that you can get and put them in the appropriate list.
By now, you should have a list of specific tags and a list of popular tags. When you tag anything, make sure to pick several related tags from each of these lists.
II. Furl
Bookmark some links to your site or blog using a few of the relevant, popular tags at Furl and a few relevant tags (both popular and specific tags) from your tag research.
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III. Del.icio.us
Look through the most popular tags at Del.icio.us. Write down any that may relate to your site(s). Bookmark some links to your site or blog (or both) using as many popular tags as you can and a mix of your relevant specific and popular tags.
IV. Flickr
If you can work images into your niche, then add a few to Flickr with a profile that includes a link to your site. Tag your images with a mix of your relevant specific and popular tags.
V. Bookmark
Bookmark your site at several of the other popular social bookmarking sites using a mix of relevant tags…
This is going to give you an absolute ton of one-way backlinks to your site! I would use something like RoboForm for logging into these sites (especially if you plan on creating more sites in the future – that way all your usernames and passwords are saved). And be sure to not just add in one site (your one site) and leave it at that – some would say that’s not really offering anything useful. It would be more valuable if you found other related links in your niche and added them all in. This way people will be more likely to find your collection of bookmarks a valuable resource ... you will only gain more traffic from adding to the value of these sites rather than spamming them.
In addition, if you boost the rank of another site that links to you, the link you have on their site is only going to pass more page rank over to you. The act of bookmarking other sites will boost their page rank … this way the PR 4 sites you currently have a link from may move up to become PR 5 sites (you never know).
AWorldofHelp.com
BeanRocket
BibSonomy
Blinklist
BlogMarks.net
BlogMemes.net
BlogLines.com
Blue.Us
BuddyMarks.com
Connectedy
Connotea (Social bookmarking for the scientific community)
CiteULike (Social bookmarking for the scientific community)
Complore (Research Collaboration Tool for Researchers)
De.lirio.us
Digg
DinnerBuzz (Social bookmarking for great places to eat)
Dohat.com
Fantacular
Favoor (Available in English and German)
Feedmarker
Feedmelinks
Flipskipper
Givealink
GoKoDo MyBookmarks
Jots
IndiaGram (Also has a voting system like Digg.com)
Indiamarks (Bookmarking site dedicated to Indian community)
Kaboodle
Librarything
Linkfilter
Linkroll
Lookmarks
Ma.gnolia
Memestreams
Myprogs (Bookmarking site for programs you use)
Netvouz
Openbm
Rawsugar
Reader2 (Bookmarking site for books)
Reddit
Scuttle
Shadows
Simpy
Sitetagger
Smarking
Spurl
Stumbleupon
Sync2it
Taghop
Tutorialism (Bookmarking website for tutorials)
Unalog
Web-feeds
Yahoo! My Web (Available in many languages)
VI. Technorati
1. Claim your blog at Technorati and enter up to 20 keywords (keyphrases) as tags to identify it. Use a mix of popular and specialized tags.
2. Add your blog to your Technorati favorites.
3. Come up with a plan of attack for getting a solid stream of traffic (how often will you blog? What will you tag?). Depending on how popular your niche is (and how much traffic you want), you may need to post a couple of times a day or just a couple of times a week.
4. Write posts related to your keywords and tag them with up to 20 tags.
5. Continue writing posts and refining your Technorati tags based on the results you
receive. Check your website logs to determine where most of the traffic is coming from and focus on those tags. Write more on what’s bringing you the most targeted traffic!
VII. Add extras to your blog
Add in the extra components to your blog to turn it into a virtual powerhouse. These include the “add to Del.icio.us”, “add to Furl”, and “add to Technorati favorites” icons.

Where to get the content for your posts?
This report wouldn’t be complete without a good overview of where to get the content for all these blog posts.
Of course one way is to write the content yourself. If you’re going to try to drive traffic to an affiliate link this is especially important. You’ll want to pre-sell people on the product or service. You can do this quite easily by explaining how you use it or how you like it. If you have a story that goes along with the product or service, you’ll stand the best chance of hitting a homerun with an affiliate program.Another way is to use Private Label Articles. There are an absolute ton of PL articles floating around out there. Buy some related to your niche and then stuff them in your blog. You can cut them apart if you want to really maximize the amount of content you have (as far as I know, there’s no minimum amount of words a post has to be).
You can also program RSS feeds to post to your blog. If you do this, you will want to put in at least a snippet of information related to your affiliate program, product or service. Some of your own content is best.
Find an interesting news article and sum it up.
These are my top picks for where to get the content for your blogs, but there are many others. I would not suggest going too far with the automated route. I believe your results will be better if you put some effort into it. The readers of Technorati aren’t going to like your blog if they get there and see garbage or completely recycled content. You can stand out with just a few posts if you choose a niche and your content carefully.

Spam
Now that you know a few tricks about tagging, I’ll get into the ethics of all this. For one, tagging sites like Technorati work best when people are honest. Sure your post may show up under the tag, but it isn’t going to get you anywhere.
Technorati shows enough text around the link to your blog that visitors will see you have nothing to offer them. You may even get banned. There really isn’t a point in tagging your post for an unrelated keyword anyway. So please don’t do it.