TypePad Help: Technorati Tags

Very few people understand the significant Google juice provided by Technorati Tags.  You are fortunate for two reasons:

1. Support for Technorati Tags is built into TypePad
2. I'm going to explain how to use them

First The Experiment

It had been about 2 years since I last tried to quantify the impact of Technorati Tags upon Google rankings and so I decided it was time to run the experiment again.  

I created two blogs under my TypePad account and made them as identical as possible.  As the subject, I chose the Planet Magrathea (deliberately misspelled 'Magrathia') from the famous Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book.  I posted the same content to both blogs.  I specified the technorati tag "Magrathia" in every post on one blog and used no Technorati Tags on the second blog.  Here's what I saw after about a week:

The blog in which i used the Technorati tags is ranked number 5 an 6 in Google for the term "Magrathia".  In fact if I expand the "Show more results from..." link, the results for the blog in which I used Technorati Tags both out rank and outnumber the one in which I did not.

Using Technorati Tags

When you create a new blog post, scroll down to the Keywords and Technorati Tags section and expand it if necessary.  You will see the Technorati Tags field.

What do you put there? Put words or phrases that describe what this post is about.  Put yourself into the shoes of your reader.  If this blog post answer's a reader's question, how would they type the question into Google?  Whatever that is, put it here.  You can use multiple tags separated by commas.  Each tag can be a word or phrase.  It helps if the word or phrase also appears in the body of your post.

Displaying Technorati Tags in the Post Footer

It does no good to enter TechnoratiTags for each post of you don't display them. Click on the Design Tab.  Click on Organize Content.  Locate the little edit icon (it looks like a pencil) adjacent to Post Footer and click on it.

Make sure that Technorati Tags is checked.

Comments

[Jaimie Hall Bruzenak]

Thanks for the explanation. I followed the instructions and Technorati tags are checked, but no new items are showing up in Google Reader for the last 5 days. I believe you helped me with that before but I didn't save it. What do I do to get them to show up again? Jaimie