USE TECHNORATI TO TRACK A LINK

Active blog tracking is done in real time that is, the results of your searches are up-to-the-minute views of what is happening in blogging. The most popular active blog tracking service is Technorati. Developed as blog use was beginning to explode, Technorati’s main purpose and main feature is tracking what blogs are saying about a specific subject and what blogs are linking to other blogs by listing the newest entries first.

Technorati ranks all blogs based on the number of links that point to that blog and calls this measurement authority. If your blog has 50 links, it has more authority than one with only 10. Many blogs have hundreds and thousands of links. By going to Technorati’s website and entering the address for your blog or your website, you can see how many blogs are linking to your site. While Technorati doesn’t currently track all blogs, it does track more than 14 million sites. If, for example, you entered www.CNN.com  as the searching entity, you’d find a large number of links to CNN nearly 75,000 links from more than 40,000 sources. (Throughout this article, we will use CNN as an example for our searches.)

Technorati presents the following information to its users:

• Number and authority of links back to a website (known as backlinks)

• The rank of the blog being searched (if you own that blog)

• The number of links in the last week

• Watchlists that notify you via e-mail of new links to your Blog

You can use the information from Technorati in a number of ways. You could, for example, contact the most influential bloggers who have linked to your site and ask them for feedback on your products, service, or brand. Several companies have even given such bloggers free samples of new products to demo and review. (I also recommend that you thank bloggers now and again for their links. It’s a small gesture and takes little time, but it’s appreciated. It’s the blogging equivalent to sending a note or a box of chocolates.)

Because Technorati sorts results based on time of creation as well as authority, you can also respond to new links in a timely way. You could respond to negative comments, thank the user for positive ones, and create positive new experiences largely thanks to the information that Technorati provides. As a result of being able to see who is linking to you, you can begin to see the community of people who link to you and link back to them to keep their interest. In the world of blogging, nothing says “thank you” like a backlink.

Sorting results based on authority lets you know who are the most “important” bloggers linking to your site. While linking isn’t the only metric of a blogger’s success or influence, it’s always a good place to start. By being aware of the popularity of bloggers linking to you, you can also be aware of your authority in the blogosphere.

Finally, if you sign up as a member of Technorati, you can see your link rank relative to other links. Once again, if your rank goes up, that means you are growing in popularity faster than the blogs next to you in terms of links so, for example, moving from a rank of 2000 to 1000 means that not only have you grown in popularity, but you have grown in popularity much faster than the other blogs who were in the 2000 range when you were.

Overall, Technorati provides a helpful snapshot view of your blog’s visibility and is very good at allowing you to stay up to date on new links so that you can track issues quickly and easily. Using this service wisely will not only enable you to stay on top of what is being said about you, but it will also allow you to see the growth of your visibility to bloggers.

ICEROCKET DOES BLOG SEARCH

IceRocket emerged in 2005 as a major contender for Technorati. It boasts many of the same core blog search features but distinguishes itself largely on speed. To put it simply, IceRocket finds posts faster, makes them searchable more quickly, and returns results much faster than Technorati.

IceRocket also includes a handful of features that Technorati doesn’t offer, including the ability to “trend” your search over time (to see how many results there were, for example) as well as the ability to subscribe to a search quickly and have those results returned as a feed. This allows you to find out about new information quickly and easily in areas of interest to you or your company. Much like PubSub, which we’ll talk about a bit later in this article, IceRocket’s feeds can be used to keep you up to date about who is saying what about your company, thus allowing you to respond quickly to customer concerns, customer questions, media coverage, or even competitor news. Smart companies make use of searching via feeds to keep track of the things that matter to their business: product names, competitors products, people who are happy or unhappy about the company, and even media attention.