My little blog is still in infancy even though I’ve been blogging for more than a year, but as A Fool of Myself continues to grow and crawl and walk, I need to be a good blogger and nurture its growth. I monitor its site traffic with Google Analytics and its RSS subscribers with Feedburner, and I’ll probably blog on these two tools in the future, but this week, I stood up like a good blogger and claimed A Fool of Myself on Technorati.com, and that’s what I want to help you with today.

What Does Technorati Do?
I’ve seen the flare and heard the references to Technorati for quite some time now, but only in the last few weeks have I come to understand the importance of Technorati for my itty bitty blog. Technorati is to blogging as the Library of Congress is to books. When you publish a new post, your blog (provided the settings are turned on*) sends a notification to Technorati that your blog has been updated. This is called a ping, and it updates your blog’s page on Technorati. And as far as I can tell, regardless of whether you have a Technorati account, every blog in the whole world (that is set to ping its updates) has a Technorati page.

This page tells the whole world about your blog. It has a list of your latest posts, reactions to your blog (which are more or less mentions or comments about your blog on other blogs), your blog’s top tags, and your blog’s fans. Technorati also calculates your authority and page rank in the blogosphere. Those last two are numbers, and if you’re anal retentive and fiercely competitive, those numbers will be important to you because they indicate the Who’s Who of the Blogosphere.

Claiming Your Blog
So your blog is already on Technorati. What are you going to do about it? To start, you need to claim it by creating a Technorati account. Once you set up your account, you can claim your blog by entering its URL and verifying that it belongs to you. Once it’s yours, add a description and tags that keyword your blog, then add a some flare of your own to your blog and announce to the world that your blog is no longer a stray and has been claimed by you, its rightful owner.

Strengthening Your Authority & Page Rank
Now what? Well, you can sit around and wait for your authority and page rank to grow, but those are like watching water boil, so it’s best if you find something else to do that will help those numbers grow, say, for instance, linking to and commenting on other blogs! When you link to other blogs, you not only help increase their numbers, but those bloggers might just link back to you in a post or a comment, and those links are like Flintstones vitamins for your blog: they make it stronger!

Playing Favorites
You can also use Technorati to keep track of and tag your favorite blogs. Everyone, even big-name bloggers, wants to know they are loved, so Technorati keeps track of how many fans your blog has. (In addition to adding my favorite blogs to my blogrolls, I’ll also be adding them to my Technorati favorites, too.)

So how does A Fool of Myself measure up? Well, my baby bunting blog needs some vitamins. Today my page rank is 871,449 and my authority is 9. It only has one fan (me), but it has 17 blog reactions. There’s definitely room for growth and humility. In the words of Mr. Rogers, “Won’t you be my fan?”

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*If you use Blogger and need to turn on pinging, go to Settings > Basic. In the pull-down menu next to “Let search engines find your blog?,” select Yes.