According to larry’s request, it is a long story so I explain how Technorati works in this separate post instead of so long comment. Technorati is actually a specific search engine focusing on providing service involving blog, blog, and blog. Generally, search engine is a key component of surfing Internet today. Nobody knows where the information they are looking for are, especially blog. Blog is not just old fashion web content but in fact, it could be categorized as up-to-date content. In other words, blogs are frequently updated than normal web page. Though, blogs are not similar to dynamic pages like webboards or forums because they are contentful and are usually in medium length. Since blogs are updated so often, search engines must update their indexes as fast as possible. How to do that? Polling is not good enough in this situation so someone proposed asynchronous solution to solve this problem. The result is XML-RPC Ping service. This solution pushed additional duty to content publishers or content management software so Ping server will be notified about the update of given URL.

Since Technorati seems to be the first blog search engine, it is very popular and worth to be searchable via Technorati. The fastest way to promote your blog is to use Technorati, especially when you are starting a new blog site from scratch and there is no other indexed sites in Google. By any general purpose search engines, Google, MSN, Yahoo and etc, you may have to wait until they index your new sites to get lots of incoming visitors. However, you can promote your sites using ping mechanism. Technorati is not only the choice by now. Google released Google Blog Search which is growing everyday. This site has incoming visitors from Google Blog Search more than from Technorati right now. Google Blog Search works the same way Technorati does. It relies on ping mechanism. However, instead of setup new ping server, Google Blog Search periodically fetches pinged sites from weblogs.com. That means you have to ping weblogs.com to make your content indexed by Google Blog Search.

Ok. So you should understand how Technorati and ping mechanism work. The point is that you don’t need to sign up at Technorati to ping them. You may sign up if you want to add your avatar into your entries in Technorati or to track some statistics about your blog sites. In conclusion, if you are blogging, don’t forget to ping at least 2 sites: weblogs.com and technorati.com to make your posts being searchable via Google Blog Search and Technorati, respectively.

For the last question about tags, you don’t need to worry about them. Tags are a nice feature to help search engines correctly extract keywords out of your contents. Only some search engines trust on tags, e.g. Technorati. Below are sample tags. They are not necessary at all. Your contents could be accessible via full-text search by the way.

Technorati Tags: English, IT, Search Engine, Software, Tips and Tricks, Blogging, Blog, Ping, Technorati,