Setting up a blog is much like setting up housekeeping in new digs. You have to move in all kinds of stuff–furniture to a house, widgets to a blog–that will make your life easier and more comfortable. And you have to let people know where you are. For a household, you register your new address with the post office and phone company, and if you’re a big shot, you send in a notice in to the newspaper’s Society Column. For a blog, you register with Technorati.

Technorati is an internet search engine for searching blogs. As of December, 2007, it had indexed 112 million weblogs. As of today, make that 112million + 1. By pasting one line of code into this blog post, I’m doing what Technorati calls “activating my claim.” That is, I’m demonstrating through my ability to post a link they generated for me that I am the owner of this blog. Posting the code that creates this link will call the Technorati spiders, who will instantly come and crawl all over my blog and add it to their index. (If you see any tiny spots of spider shit on my blog today, you’ll understand why.)

Getting indexed in Technorati is akin to a debutante’s ball for a blog. It’s the way you tell the blogosphere, “I’m coming out!” It helps you get noticed and build up your blog rank–something that’s important if you want to monetize your blog with ads or paid postings.

If you have a blog and haven’t yet activated your claim with Technorati, what are you waiting for? All you need to do is go here: http://technorati.com/

And if you like The Internet Wizards Blog, you can tell Technorati by clicking here:

Posted by Bonnie Boots, publisher of The Internet Wizards Magazine for people who want to make their own products and market on the internet. Get a free 1-year subscription by registering on the home page at http://www.theinternetwizards.com