You might have decided that you need to get a Technorati Authority for your site, but how do you go round it?

First, I used to consider that pinging Technorati works. Don’t bother, they ignore pings now! You might as well take away the ping from your blog and save the processing time. So what do you do? Here are the measures we have used to swiftly get a ranking.

1. Go technorati.com and sign up for an account. Simple. You will need to confirm it as usual by clicking an email link, but in general, nothing clever!

2. Find the claim a site button. Follow the form for instructions here – enter your website URL and press next, then type in the details you find. Don’t submit it only yet!

If you don’t know your RSS feed address, it could be displayed on your blog somewhere. Only right click and then copy link location to copy it and paste it where it is asked for. If it isn’t shown somewhere, you are missing a trick!

3. One of the optional fields is for sites linking back to you. If you have been using FTS or article directories, then you should have some of these. Go to Yahoo and search link:www.yourblog.com and find several websites linking back to you (forget Google, unless you have heaps of links). Copy and paste three of these into the form. I have no idea if it really helps, but the question is there, so in case it does…

4. imagine up some suitable tags and enter them, plus choose the three categories that match your weblog the best. Now, check the details and press submit.

Now, they will email you a claim code that you have to put into your website. This seems to be the biggest sticking point for getting listed – positioning this claim token. The problem is here that Technorati seems to do a double check.

First, they spider the website to check the claim token exists and second they look for it in your RSS feed. The second makes sense, as I will explain in a moment. But why then do the first? If both checks used the RSS feed then an error message might be generated. I think that this is the reason that numerous claims are failing and why loads of blogs are not getting listed. Let me explain more!

The reason to use the RSS feed rather than merely spidering the website is because anyone could place a comment in a site, which could include the claim token. You have to be able to update the posts to be able to get it onto the RSS feed.

So what causes the claim problem? Well, loads of bloggers set the RSS feed to just display a summary, rather than the full post. If the claim token is too far down the post, then it won’t be read by Technorati. Therefore, your blog doesn’t get listed properly.

So, when you receive your claim token, create a new post and put the token in the first sentence. I would recommend within the first 30 words at the most. Also, (in WordPress), go to settings, reading and be certain that the RSS feed is giving the entire post. A belt and braces job, but better to ensure that. Once you start to see a Authority appearing, you could reset your feed to summary merely if you prefer.

After that, you should be ready to get listed. You merely have to get other bloggers to mention you in their posts!

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