Admittedly people might question why I should worry about what Technorati thinks of me. To be honest, I don’t care, but I do care that many of my favourite bloggers prefer to read posts by subscribing to technorati tags than to blogs. So if I want them to read my posts I need to understand how this blog search engine works. Also people use blog search engines to locate blogs worth reading – so I need to make sure my blog is showing up in blog search directory for my niche area.
Mistakenly I thought everything was okay since I had seen my posts on Technorati.
Advanced Blog Searches
WRONG – When I did an advanced blog search using the term m-learning my sites were not being listed.
If I want to have my blog to appear in technorati blog search directory I need to join Technorati and then claim my blog (and podcast sites).
I also needed to use variations of the same tag term to ensure my blog is easier to locate.
My blog and podcast site can now be located in Technorati blog search however ability to locate in search directory is affected by which variation of a tag is used in the search.
If I use:
- m-learning : both sites rank highly
- mlearning : my podcast site ranks and not my blog site
See how Technorati mocks me? Both sites have been tagged on Technorati with m-learning and mlearning, so I have no idea.
Basic Post Searches
My original reason for searching Technorati was for my Day 14 task (Analyze Your Blog’s Competition for 31 Days Blog Project). While I read a lot of blogs I wanted to read more blogs in my niche area (mlearning), and I wanted to work out how bloggers are subscribing to Technorati tags.
So I inserted the term m-learning into the search area. After several frustrating hours, of not being able to work out why all my search attempts using m-learning were giving me posts that had absolutely nothing to do with m-learning I realised that unlike their blog search, their basic search was not recognising m-learning as a search term. Instead it was giving me any post that had the term learning in it. Change the search term to mlearning and now I found the posts I wanted.
But just to totally annoy me if I change the search term to “mobile learning” my search results were totally different.
Technorati’s basic search appears to search for the terms within posts. So I need to have a good think about terms used for both tagging my posts and words used within my posts or alternatively I could start adding the desired technorati tags into my posts.
Subscribing to Technorati Tags
You can subscribe to technorati tags by clicking on the subscribe icon and adding to your Feed Reader (or if your Feed Reader automatically locates the feed copy and paste the tag URL into your Reader).
Screencast on Using Technorati
There is no way I can cover all the things you can do with Technorati.. Check out Demogirl’s screencast of How She Uses Technorati. While you are at her site – do a search – she has excellent “How to” screencasts on a range of topics. 🙂
Sue Waters 
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