Blog And Ping – What’s That…
Have a new website you want indexed with search engines? Have an existing website you want to position well in search engine results? Have a good performing website you want to remain competitive? Whatever your reason, you’re sure to benefit from the blog
You may have heard or read about this technique before, but you never realized how it works. Or this may be the first time you have been acquainted with this surefire process. Let’s talk about the basics and the mechanics of the blog and ping strategy.
It All Starts With A Blog.
Web logs, or blogs as people have fondly referred to them in recent years, were originally designed for social purposes. People used them as online diaries where they could post their thoughts, the events of their days, their secret desires and the like. But blogs possessed some very special qualities that internet marketers found hard to dismiss.
* Blogs figure prominently in search engine results. The first few pages of some queries would yield many blogs occupying premium spots.
* Blogs are basically free web publishing tools. A little tweaking and they became a website of its own.
* Blogs are easy to update. Just press EDIT or PUBLISH and you’d have new content in a flash. No need to change the source code. The system will easily take care of that.
* Blogs have their own communities. Bloggers often link with one another. This is a level of connectivity that is pretty hard to come by in other mediums.
Hence, online businessmen started using blogs for marketing purposes.
The strategy goes like this:
1. Create a blog dedicated to the subject your main website is catering to. Start by creating an account,say with www.blogger.com. This service is owned by Google, the most widely used search engine in the World Wide Web.
2. Post regularly, and include a link to your website in majority of your messages. Also include your links with popular keywords as anchor texts.
3. Include a link to your own website on the navigation bar.
4. Just to emphasize, you should post REGULARLY. This means at least every other day. No sweat, though, Short posts of 200 words in length would be enough.
It’s About RSS As Well
Blogs produce RSS feeds. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, a technology
If you’re using blogger, it’s easy. Take your blog’s URL. For example, it is:
www.thisisyourblog.blogspot.com
Now, all you have to do is to add the extension atom.xml. So, it should appear like this:
www.thisisyourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
This is the URL of your RSS feeds.
Now you need an RSS aggregator somewhere which to pick up your RSS feeds. Preferably, it is a website that can be easily crawled by search engine spiders. The perfect spot for this is my.yahoo.com. Simply create a Yahoo account. Click on ‘personalize this page’. Under ‘content’, you will find two menu items. One will be ‘add modules’. The second will be ‘add rss feed’. when the ADD RSS button comes up, just paste in the URL of your RSS feed(s).
Every time your blog is updated, RSS feeds should be generated and displayed in www.my.yahoo.com. Please remember your specific RSS feed may be different depending on the platform you are using (mine is www.webgroupmarketing.com/feed). A quick check with your webmaster should give you the information you need.
Now let’s ‘ping’.
Once your www.my.yahoo.com is set up, every time you post a new entry on your blog, you’ll need to go to www.pingomatic.com. Fill up the appropriate fields, then submit. This will inform a lot of blog directories that your blog has new entries. And this should drive the search engine spiders on a feeding frenzy. It’ll be a reminder for them to check out your blog come the next relevant query.
How powerful is the blog-ping combo?
Your new website can get indexed in Yahoo within days. And with Yahoo picking up your website, and with www.blogger.com being owned by Google, it shouldn’t be long until the world’s most widely used search engine indexes your new website as well.
And if the blog-ping combo could do this for new websites, just think of the possibilities it could provide for older ones. Fantastic, isn’t it?
There are also plugin’s and scripts to automate this blog and ping process if you;re running a blog on your own domain.
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