No Comments Written by Robert on August 12, 2008 – 6:37 pm

After you have optimized your Web site for the major search engines, you can sit back and catch your breath for a short time, but there are more ways to drive traffic to your Web site other than the three first-tier search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Many Web sites specialize in organizing very specific types of Web sites rather than trying to index the entire Internet.

Getting your site exposure on these more targeted search engines can send extra traffic, or allow you to target a niche that may be too competitive to rank for in the major search engines. As the World Wide Web becomes more and more saturated, the demand is likely to trend toward search engines that specialize in one specific form of media and do it very well.

Specialty search engines cater to specific users by only indexing content within a specific area or niche. For example, some of the most useful specialty search engines allow Web users to search blogs, images, auction sites, social bookmarks, or classified ads.

Although you can use Google to search for practically any kind of information, using specialty search engines allows you to minimize nonrelevant search results, as well as become part of the community that is typically associated with niche engines. People who use search engines such as Technorati, eBay, and Shopping.com tend to not only use the engines to search for information, but also to submit their own blogs or products.

Optimize Blog Posts for Technorati

Technorati is an example of one of these specialized search engines. It focuses mainly on blogs and allows users to search only for Web sites that have blogs about the specific topic they are interested in. If you can get your blog to rank highly on Technorati, you can ensure your site’s blog will get hundreds of new readers every day and in turn boost the number of links pointing to your Web site.

Unlike leading search engines such as Google and Yahoo that attempt to index the entire World Wide Web, Technorati only indexes blogs. Technorati’s primary competitors are Google, Yahoo, and IceRocket. As of December 2007, Technorati indexes over 100 million blogs.

Technorati is an Internet search engine dedicated to searching blogs. As of December 2007, Technorati was tracking 112.8 million blogs and is arguably the most recognized authority on what is happening on the World Live Web at the present time.

The Live Web, as Technorati calls it, is the dynamic and ever-changing portion of the Web created by users. User generated content includes Weblogs, photo sharing sites, and video sharing sites. This type of user-generated media is sometimes referred to as citizen media. Although Technorati has expanded its listings to these other types of citizen media, it began with blogs, and that area of the social Web remains its specialty.

Technorati works similarly to the way that other search engines work in that it uses the number of links pointing to a blog to track its popularity, or as Technorati calls it, authority. To rank highly on Technorati, you must participate regularly in the blogging community.

If you read an article on someone else’s blog that you think is well written, post a link to it on your blog; someday that blog’s author may return the favor. You should also become a Technorati member and make friends on the site. Users on Technorati can declare your blog a “favorite” and help you rank higher for the key topics you write about.

Another way to ensure that you are appearing in the Technorati results is to tag every blog entry you write with descriptive keywords. Technorati uses descriptive words and phrases to categorize your posts as it searches the 1.6 million new blog posts per day.

For example, users of Technorati type in keywords such as “Hillary Clinton” or “Presidential Election” to look for content related to those topics; if your blog post is tagged with these keywords, you increase the odds that your blog will be included when these terms are used to perform a search. You should also keep in mind that many items are ranked by the date posted, so be sure to update often.

It is not always easy to think up new and interesting topics to blog about. If you want to get more traffic to your blog and cannot seem to come up with any fresh ideas, navigate to the Technorati “Popular” section and look at the top searches for the day. These topics are a great indicator of what is hot in the blogosphere right now. If any of these popular searches relate in any way to the overall focus of your blog, you should come up with a short, informative article that you can tag with the same keyword.

Technorati users frequently check what is popular in their community, and having a recent, interesting, and on-topic blog post related to content and keyword tags from the Popular Searches page is a great way to get your Web site noticed. Targeting what is popular today ensures that your blog is popular tomorrow.