How to Add Technorati Tags to Your Post
In order for your blog posts to become part of a wider conversation and for others to actually find your thoughts, it is a good idea to add RELEVANT tags to your posts with technorati.
I remember, when I just started out blogging, I was really confused with all the different tags and categories on my blog, on del.icio.us and on technorati . What was each there for? What is the difference between them?
I use WordPress for the Langwitches blog and really did not fully understand, WHY I was supposed to assign a category to each one of my blog posts AND assign a tag to it as well.
By now, I have figured out the follwoing:
- del.icio.us tags are in charge of categorizing my bookmarks, so others can benefit from my links and each attached tag. If I use a tag that others use as well, they will find the links that I added. Others can also subscribe to a specific tag, so they will receive notification when anyone has added something new with that particular tag. If you choose to use a very "specific tag", you will limit the results only to the links that you or others, who you have shared that "specific tag" with, applied it to. Very useful when tagging something specifically for a certain group, where you don’t want outsiders additions.
- The different categories that I assign posts on my blog to, really only help organize my own blog. It allows others to see ALL blog posts that are related to a specific category WITHIN my blog. So, if someone is interested in looking at all of my blog posts that have something to do with "Elementary School", they can click on my "Elementary School " category and the results will only display those posts.
- Now, the technorati tags that you assign, in addition to the blog categories, are intended to add your post link to anyone else’s in the blogosphere out there. Anytime you type in a tag, technorati will add it to all the other posts that used the same tag. If you are a group and want to collect all the relevant posts about a certain topic, you will need to agree what the exact tag will be that everyone will use to tag their posts with. In the Comment Challenge, it was decided to use "comment08 ". If you use the tag "challenge08 ", results that have nothing to do with our Comment Challenge will be returned.
So, if you are participating in the 31 Day Comment Challenge and you choose to write a blogpost about it- How can you include the Technorati tag, so the rest of us are made aware of it?
You can add by hand the following link at the bottom of each post, before you publish it. :
comment08 – this links you to "http://technorati.com/tag/comment08"
If you have a self hosted blog and are using WordPress, you can download a great Plugin Called WP Tags to Technorati . Download the plugin and upload via FTP to your wp-content/plugins directory.
Sign into your Dashboard and click on Plugins and then Activate the plugin.
When you write a post, make sure you add the tag.
The plugin will take care of converting these tags into technorati tags and will show up on your post like this
Now go to Technorati- Comment08 and subscribe to the RSS feed in your favorite reader (ex. Google Reader or Bloglines).
If you are using Blogger and Typepad , please add the tag term "Comment08" into a sentence in your post, better yet make it a link comment08 – this links you to "http://technorati.com/tag/comment08". Technorati seems to be having problems picking your posts up otherwise.
You could add the following sentence at the bottom of your post:
And if you are part of The Comment Challenge remember to add the " comment08 " tag to your post
It took me a while to understand the difference between categories and tags. Then I read this post about the two. This is the quote that really clarified it for me: “I think of categories as a table of contents and tags as the index page of a book.”
@JasonR
Thank you for including the link to Lorelle’s blog. What a great analogy. I will have to remember that when trying to explain the difference next time. Table of Contents and Index Page.
Constructively composed and well set out. I shall make use of the Technorati tags. Thank you, John.
Thanks for the very useful post. I have followed all this but although it appears to be installed there is something wrong since when I click the Technorati Tagging tab in settings I get “Fatal error: Call to undefined function: is_plugin_page() in…”. Do you think this could be an error in the way I set it up, or a problem with WordPress 2.51 to which I have just upgraded? (Sorry, I realise this is not a tech support forum!- just wondered if there were any words of wisdom before I look further)
[...] In order to add your posts to the Comment Challenge conversations, check out Silvia’s post on adding Technorati tags. [...]
HeiSilvia, I don’t think you need the plugin at all on a self-hosted WordPress blog (or any WordPress blog for that matter). If you look at the Technorati page for the comment08 tag, you’ll see posts from Open Stacks, but I’ve installed no such plugin.
If you just use the tags field in the post form itself, Technorati picks that up. I don’t think I’ve done anything else fancy, except to make sure that my site is set to tell pingomatic about new posts, but this is the default setting anyway.
@Greg
Thank you for the clarification about WordPress and the techorati tags. I am still trying to figure the relationship between these tags and all the different blogging platforms out. What version of WP are you using?
I’m running 2.5.1, but I’m pretty sure it’s been true for as long as tags have been integrated into WordPress (as of 2.3?). I went to the blog of the plugin’s author to ask why it was necessary (thus fulfilling the goals of today’s challenge activity), so we’ll see what he has to say.
Silvia:
I’ve been trying to make the whole Technorati tag system work over on Blogger. Technorati says to make sure the Basic Settings for “Add your blog to our listings” should be set to Yes to update Technorati. Sue Waters pointed out that my posts were not getting picked up and my ping was five days old. I’m still working on it and I’ll manually ping for now.
I also noticed that in Technorati, my search was set to find comment08 for blogs with some authority. I changed it to anyauthority and it gave me many more results.
Thanks for all your efforts on the Comment Challenge.
@Ann
I don’t know if you already tried the following advice from the wiki.
Andrea from Edtechworkshop is using blogger and it looks like her posts are being picked up. >
Thanks. I did have that in the body of the blog post, but it still didn’t pick it up until I pinged it manually. I still think I have something set up incorrectly. I’ll figure it out before the Challenge is over. Thanks for your continued support.
[...] first stems from a post on the Langwitches blog, in which Silvia discusses adding Technorati tags to your posts. She discusses a WordPress plugin called WP Tags to Technorati, which will do pretty much as it [...]