Saturday

#14 (WEEK 6) Technorati, Tags, and SEO

So now that you’ve been blogging for awhile, you might be wondering just how big is the blogosphere? Well according to San Francisco based Technorati, the leading search tool and authority for blogs, there are over 175,000 new blogs created every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.” Technorati tracks millions of blogs.

As you’ve already seen for yourselves, blogging is so easy that these publishing tools are being taken advantage of by almost every industry, including libraries.So how do you get your blog listed as part of the blogosphere and how can you tag your posts with keywords to make them more findable through a Technorati search? The answer to the first question is that your blog is probably already being captured by Technorati due to the fact that you’re already using Blogger, the most popular blogging tool. There are a lot of features in Technorati including the capability to search for keywords in blog posts, search for entire blog posts that have been tagged with a certain keyword, limit a search by language, or search for blogs that have been registered and tagged as whole blogs about a certain subject (like photography or libraries).

Google has added a blog search. This is another place to search blogs or blog postings - blogsearch.google.com/

Discovery Exercise:
  1. Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “Classroom Learning 2.0” (try with and without the quotation marks) in Blog posts, in tags, and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different? Do the same using Google Blogsearch.
  2. Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?
  3. Create a blog post about your discoveries on this site.
  4. Now that we’ve worked with tags in Flickr, Delicious, and Technorati, what are your thoughts about tagging? What are its advantages? What are its disadvantages?
Discovery Resources:

Curriculum Connections:

Idea #1: Use these tools to locate blogs and other sites relating to voting or elections, school funding, childhood obesity, or other issues.

Idea #2: Identify a half dozen blogs for students to learn about and then have them make a graph to compare Technorati versus the broader search engines. Be sure to refer to the curriculum content standard and/or Model School Library Content Standard addressed by the project.

Suggested "tags" or labels: Technorati, blogs, tags, SEO-search engine optimization
Posted by at