Business Blogging Tool: Technorati

Weblogs are becoming an increasingly effective way to increase visibility on the Web for your business. Technorati is a tool that helps you keep track of links between weblogs, both to monitor your own site's visibility and to track your partners, customers, and competitors.

As easily as you would use a search engine, you can see what they refer to as a site's Link Cosmos. As an example, take a look at who's linking to this site.

They also maintain a list of the Top 100 Technorati, the most heavily linked-to blogs on the Web.

If you're running multiple blogs, you can also create a Technorati profile that allows you to view and manage the information about your various blogs.

All of the above services are free, but for a small fee ($5-$10), you can set up a watchlist, which will give you daily reports of changes to the websites you're watching, keep track of the Google ranking, and find out when people link to your blog or website (or track your competitors, too!).

Now, you can search for links to your site in Google and other search engines, but they are notoriously incomplete and out of date. Technorati, on the other hand, monitors the centralized notification centers for news and blog postings, and their index is updated every few minutes, so the information is very complete and up-to-the-minute.