Well, there’s only a couple of posts on my blog so far but it’s never too early to think about how you’re going to get more people to your site.  I’m not after mega traffic - the site is mainly for me to keep my notes in but while I’m here, I might as well go for the search engines.

There are quite a few blog directories out here on the internet but the biggest (as far as I can see) is Technorati so I have decided to give that a go.

You need to create an account with them - it enables you to have multiple blogs in one place which is handy.  One thing I’m not keen on is that it’s not too easy to navigate but after a batch of clicking around, I find that you have to “Claim a blog”.  Choose that and enter your details. 

When claiming, you have to prove that the blog is yours (fair enough…).  Technorati give you 2 options to do that - one is to post a message (Technorati gives you a code to put in your post, you put it up on your site, tell Technorati it’s there and when it’s checked its existance it tells you to remove the post…) the other is to give it the admin username / password of your blog.  I chose this option - I trust Technorati but you can always change the password later if you choose.

You can enter a title / description / keywords and I’d certainly recommend putting as much as you can.  Technorati is a search engine and can use this info for surfers.

When your blog has been entered into the system, you then need to arrange for your WordPress script to “ping” Technorati every time you make a new post to your blog.  This will cause the post to be added to Technorati for people to find and help the search engine spiders to find you.  To have Wordpress automatically ping Technorati (and other services), check in your blogs settings / writing section.  Down the bottom it has a box titled “Update Services”.  In here, hopefully you have at least http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ listed (perhaps more).  Basically, it means that whenever you place a post, your WordPress will send a message to pingomatic.com which in turn will tell Technorati / other sites that you’ve been updated and need to be reindexed.

If you wish, you can manually ping Technorati from your account - if you click around for 10 mins and find the option

Being in Technorati won’t bring enormous traffic for you but it’s a start and it helps…hopefully.

I’ve just found a plugin that can help with Technorati (allegedly).  Just checking into it and I will probably be making a post about it very soon…

Martin

Technorati Tags: technorati, wordpress, increase traffic