Technorati Tags

by Erin Banister

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It’s easy to overlook the importance of [tag]technorati[/tag] [tag]tags[/tag], especially if you haven’t had the time to educate yourself on them. Tagging is a nifty [tag]web2.0[/tag] buzzword(buzz action?) that really means categorizing.

You post on a variety of topics in your blog, and you categorize your posts using the categories feature with your [tag]blogging[/tag] platform. Tagging is a way to further categorize your posts. Let’s say, for example, that you’ve written a post on small business ethics, with emphasis on sales and customer retention. You categorize this post under your ‘ethics’ category.

You want people searching for this information to find you, but with the general ‘ethics’ umbrella its doubtful that it will be found. This is what tags are for: to further categorize your posts. So, the end of your post would look like:

Tags: ethics, small business, sales, customer retention, customer service

You’ve probably seen this page before, it’s http://www.technorati.com/tags/. Many many people come here, looking to see what people are posting on their [tag]blog[/tag]. The bigger the word is in the green box, the more it’s being talked about. As you can see, Microsoft, Bush, and Origami are all very popular blogs at this moment (2:40 pm Mountain time, March 10 2006). If you were to click on any of these links, you would be taken to a page where all the blogs that have that tag have been categorized, by most recent. So, if I were to publish a post on Microsoft right now, and tag it as such, I would expect to find myself within those result parameters. How cool is that?!?

Now, to actually post tags in your blog isn’t that difficult either. Technorati supplies a code that you can insert in any post:

(a xhref="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]” rel=”tag”>[tagname](/a) (Just replace the ( and ) for angle brackets )
All you have to do is replace the [tagname] variable with any tag. A tag like bush, microsoft, origami, business ethics, etc.

If you’re using [tag]Wordpress[/tag], it’s a little easier. Instead of typing out that code all the time, you can go download the SimpleTags plugin, which enables you to label tags by using a simple string, [ tag ] (without spaces) It’s really quite nifty, and easy to use. I’m not aware of any plugins like [tag]SimpleTags[/tag] for Typepad or Blogger, but I’d love to hear about them if you do!

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