I was looking at the home page of my blog the other day and just feeling that it was, well, too busy. Again.

Doesn’t that happen to all Web sites and blogs? You add this, you add that, but you never take anything down until it’s too late…until the bushes have overgrown the front windows. Then you realize it’s time to prune.

As I was looking at the flyte blog, wondering what to remove, I looked at the Technorati Tags that are on the bottom of each post. I’ve long been a fan of tags, and I think they have a lot of benefits in the right place. Still, I didn’t remember seeing much traffic from Technorati the last few times I viewed my stats. My Google Analytics confirmed this:

Only 256 visits in the past year. Less than one per day, and as the graph shows, it’s been falling steadily. Not one in the past month. And some of the 256 visits aren’t even from the tags; they’re from searches or people following my blog at Technorati.

Now, this may be due to my topic. If I was writing about politics and had Sarah Palin tags, or wrote about entertainment and tagged Hannah Montana or Miley Cyrus then maybe I could generate some traffic from the zeitgeist. But I write about SEO and Web Marketing, and those don’t seem to generate a lot of incoming traffic.

With the diminishing returns from Technorati tags I’m strongly considering dropping them entirely. I’m also considering keeping them on individual post pages and removing them from the home, category and archive pages. If we can figure out how to do that.

What are your thoughts? Keep ‘em or toss ‘em? Have you had any success with driving traffic to your blog with Technorati tags?

Rich Brooks
Tag This!