All About Leatherman Tools

One of the best ways to get your blog out there is to let people know about it. This can be done by a number of ways, this article is focusing on technorati.com. This website is defined by it’s owners as:

“Technorati is the recognized authority on what’s happening on the World Live Web, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.” “

So what does this actually mean? I don’t know the full extent of it yet, but I do know that you can set up a free account on their site and add your blog to their database of blogs. The objective of course is to ultimately be noticed by the blogging community on technorati.com and get lots of traffic. This is sort of like google.com, but for blogs.

I just finished registering this blog at technorati.com, wow, I’m only ranked 8,911,336, I wonder how long it takes to move up 100,000 (or rather down 100,000)…

Someone suggested that I also register the blog at blogskinny.com which I promptly did only to find out that in order to get verified, I need to put one of their image / track back code snippets which tie back to an affiliate program that pays them! Am I missing something? Is it worth it to register at blogskinny.com and give them free advertising to be included in their search engine?

Note to self: review and study blog search directories, the good, the bad, the ugly.

I don’t know how important tagging is, both in terms of search engine optimization as well as in terms of site usability. All I know is that tagging is another way to provide users with access to information in a classified manner. When writing an article for a blog we have the option of “tagging” the article. The problem is that unlike categories where WordPress gives you a list of categories to choose from, tagging is more of a free style process that gives you granular control of how an article is found on your blog.

This is great and simple enough to use, but if you write a lot of articles on the same topic, then tagging can be a chore. Luckily there’s a great plugin for WordPress that makes tagging less of a chore. You can find it here: Simple Tags. The developer’s website is here: Simple Tags Developer.

Simple Tags offers many options that add value to your articles, in particular, the following are worth mentioning:

1. You can select tags from previously written articles.  This creates a consistent tagging experience for both the writer and the reader.
2. Simple Tags will also suggest tags from Yahoo and the Internet, this is really cool.
3. Simple Tags integrates with the All in One SEO plugin in that certain features are disabled if the All in One SEO plugin is installed.
4. Embedded tagging allows you to write articles and embed tags in the articles, by using the “tagging” element identifiers which are customizable.  This is particularly useful if you’re submitting articles to your blog via e-mail.

There are many more features that we’ll discuss as we develop this blog.