Technorati not just techno babble

If you search for just about any popular keyword on Google you will notice one site that continually comes up very high in the results, usually on the first page. This site is Technorati, a blog search engine, and when it comes to SEO they are absolutely killing it.

So let's take a look and see why, of all things, a blog search engine is ranking for such difficult keywords as SEO, blogging, branding, humor, and many many more.

First of all they use search friendly urls. For example...

http://www.technorati.com/tags/seo
http://www.technorati.com/tags/humor

Let's compare that with another blog search engine, Sphere. When I search for SEO the results show up with a url like...

http://www.sphere.com/search?q=seo&datedrop=1&lang=en&x=0&y=0

Not only are the urls from Technorati better from an SEO standpoint but also from a usability standpoint. It's much easier for me to remember a URLs like Technorati's than Sphere's URLs, and much easier to link to and tell other people as well.

Probably the main reason they are ranked so well is all the links that they get into the tag pages. Often times when bloggers write a post they will include Technorati tags at the bottom of their post. These are links to the tags pages and it makes it so their blog shows up under those keyword tags on Technorati.

Technorati Tags

This was a brilliant idea that Technorati came up with. They have enticed bloggers to link to them on every post using keywords as the anchor text. This is what really helps them rank for all those difficult keywords. If they have thousands of links coming into their site using the same keywords the search engines are going to see that and naturally rank them high for those keywords.

Technorati is also using search engine friendly title tags. Every one of their title tags includes the same keyword as the tag and the anchor text from the inbound links. However, the title tags could be improved on a little, if they moved the keyword to the beginning of the title.

You also can't look past the on page content they have. Every one of these pages is filled with content that's made up of snippets of blog posts. Often time the keyword is used several times in the copy of the page. Also, this makes for very unique content for each tag page.

These are just a few of the things that standout when looking over how well Technorati has done SEO. They are also doing a number of other things well, but these are the ones that standout as major ranking factors. There is a lot that everyone can learn from the way Technorati has optimized their website that can apply to any website.

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