Just How Important Are Technorati Tags And Wordpress Categories

Taking into account that search engines are currently the principal means for accessing blogs in the Internet, having one’s blog listed among the top result of a search query is paramount in order to drive traffic to one’s blog. To help boost your blog’s ranking for search engine, here is a tip that any webmaster worth his salt can tell you: Think of the most probable keywords or tags that will be used to search for your blog and then make sure to include these words in your blog post. Make them part of your title. If you are a WordPress user, make them your Technorati tag or WordPress category. Doing so would give you a better chance of being crawled by the search engines.

About Technorati Tags

Technorati is a popular real-time search engine that monitors what is happening in the world of weblogs – the blogosphere. Adhering to the idea that the relevance of a blog is determined by the number of other blogs that link to it, Technorati traces the number of links, the perceived importance of blogs, as well as the actual time of blogging. Technorati automatically receives advice from blogs as soon as they are updated. Technorati tracks down all activities in the blogosphere and indexes them immediately after posting.

As bloggers have probably realized by now, Technorati is an authority in keeping up with the blogging community. Technorati is one of the best traffic sources. Blog posts organized by Technorati tags are its main feature. Technorati makes your blog much easier to find when Internet users search by utilizing Technorati tags.

A Technorati tag is a keyword or a category used to briefly describe the subject matter of a blog post. It can be one or more words. Bloggers categorize or classify their blog posts using tags. The process of assigning tags to blog posts is known as tagging.

For instance, you have a post about cooking, you can use tags like healthy cooking, culinary delights, kitchen gadgets, regional cuisine, food trips, etc. as your tags. You can tag your post with anything you wish. Technorati will still index it and display it on their tag pages.

Technorati tags are like the tags bloggers add to pictures or images on Flickr, the photo sharing site (e.g. using the tag ”culinary delights” for a photo of a sumptuous parmesan chicken with quick salsa verde dish). Technorati tags are also like the tags used to bookmark blog posts in http://del.icio.us. Bloggers assign tags and share all the links with other users through the tags. In fact, Technorati works with these two sites. When you go to Technorati and view a particular post for a specific tag, you will also see images and links to blogs given the same tags by bloggers on http://del.icio.us and Flickr.

Technorati tags offer another way of finding information and interacting on the Internet. Technorati tags usher you to a collection of posts tagged with the same tag. Technorati tags can link to related tag categories not just on Technorati but the other tag sites as well showing a compilation of posts from around the web all related to the tag. Tags can also link to a generated blog post enumerating all the posts on your blog associated with that specific tag. Technorati tags can also be linked from within the text thru a list anywhere on your blog that will take you to the Technorati site for more posts related to the same tag.

Technorati uses WordPress categories as tags. Technorati will automatically recognize your WordPress category names as tags. You can add more tags by just adding a rel=”tag” to any link on your blog. You can also avail of the numerous WordPress plug-ins for maximizing Technorati tags which can be found on the Plug-ins/Technorati list in the WordPress site.

About WordPress Categories

Bloggers using WordPress as their blogging platform can maximize the Categories feature. Categories come with WordPress. You have full rein to add as many categories or subcategories as you like to make it easy for users to find information they need. As mentioned earlier Technorati uses WordPress categories as tags.

Each post in WordPress is entered under one or more categories. This allows posts with related content to be compiled together. Each category may be assigned to a Category Parent. Categories are displayed in hierarchy and alphabetically. Subcategories are displayed after the Parent Category. There are some basic information associated with a category – a unique name, category parent, description (optional) and the number of posts which are members of the category.

Links to categories are shown in different places on the blog. WordPress lists category links in the sidebar. WordPress also shows all the categories to which a given post belongs. When a user views a blog and clicks on one of the category links, a page with all the posts belonging to that category will be displayed.

Just like traditional website marketing, organizing content into categories, in this case WordPress categories, helps both visitors and search engines to easily understand what your blog posts are about and find other posts related to the same category.

Optimizing Technorati Tags and WordPress for Search Engines

Tags are categories that organize the blog system. Given that WordPress categories translate to Technorati tags, it follows that by tagging a blog post, you connect it with a unique category. Technorati provides a tag search that allows web surfers to browse for posts in a particular category. If your posts are properly tagged, this can bring significant traffic.

Google, Yahoo and MSN incorporate Technorati’s tag pages into their search results. This is the reason why Technorati receives much traffic. The longer your post stays at the top of a Technorati tag, the more traffic you will receive. To stay on top, you can continue posting new content related posts to a specific tag.

How high the Technorati tag ranks in the search engine results depend on certain factors. It depends in part on how relevant and unique your Technorati tags are. The more relevant they are, the more likely your blog post will appear in search results. The better you match your Technorati tags (WordPress categories) with the actual content of your blog post, the higher your post will rank in search engines. It will also be effortless for web surfers to navigate within your site. To put it simply, the higher your search engine ranking, the more traffic you receive.

Another factor to consider in attaining a high page rank in search engine results is the number of bloggers that have tagged their posts by linking back to Technorati. In fact all blog posts that tag directly to Technorati have received a boost in link popularity. Based on the number of links to your blog from other sites, your blog is given a Google PageRank (a system for ranking web pages and blog posts). The higher the rank, the easier it will be for web users to find your blog when they search for related data. A high Google PageRank will definitely increase your search engine optimization as Google PageRank serves as the basis for the entire web search tools.

About the Author: Danny Wirken http://www.theinternetone.net