You're a blogger and most likely, you are constantly hearing about pinging or blog and ping. The thing is, you don't know what it is and what it can do for your blog. Well, that's fine because a lot of bloggers don't quite understand pinging. In this article, I will explain what pinging is, how it helps your blog, and what the best pinging services are.

What is pinging?

When a blog is pinged, it essentially tells a web blog tracking system that the blog has been updated. Thus, pinging is the process of telling tracking services that a site has been updated.

So how does pinging work? Well, a ping service scans blogs for updates on a regular basis. Whenever there is a new update for a particular blog, it is reported back to the pinging service’s site. You can almost think of ping services being just like search engine spiders - both scan sites looking for information, and both report that information back to their specific site. The difference is, a ping service only reports back new blog posts.

Why is pinging useful for your blog?

Pinging, in effect, tells people that there is a new blog posting available. Those who are loyal followers of your blog will see the ping and want to visit your blog. Those who haven’t read your blog before will also see the ping and perhaps think “Hey, there’s a new blog I haven’t been to before, I think I’ll check it out”.

Pinging helps to increase your traffic because it tells people when your blog is updated. Those who visit sites with pinging services will see this information in the form of a ticker on the left or right side, or top of the page. The ticker is usually in XML format and typically includes the title and URL of your blog, as well as the date and time of the update.

OK, so now you know what pinging is. But which websites offer pinging…?

The answer is, there are several pinging services available which you can use to have your blog pinged. We’ll go over some of them right now.

Pingomatic.com

This one is usually the standard ping service which is listed in your blog interface. It pings several ping services at once like e.g. Blogstreet, IceRocket, Moreover and Weblogalot.

Weblogs.com

Weblogs.com is probably the most well-known pinging service. Weblogs.com monitors sites for updates and then pings whenever there is an update to report. Virtually every blog software is available to use Weblogs.

Yahoo’s Blo.gs

Another popular pinging service. This one is offered by Yahoo and has a built-in integration with movable type and other tools. One cool thing about this service is that it offers the ability to give out updates via Instant Messenging services like AOL and ICQ. It is a direct pinging service, so those who sign up for subscriptions to your blog will be sent an email anytime your blog is updated.

Blogrolling.com

Blogrolling allows its bloggers to manage their blogrolls (updates) through a web-based interface. Recently
updated blogs are also highlighted on Blogrolling’s web site. Data is automatically retrieved from other sites like blogger.com and weblogs.com every 5 minutes. Often times your blog is already being pinged by Blogrolling, so you might not have to sign up for it. Search on the site first for your URL before signing it up.

Technorati

Available at http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping, Technorati is another service that pings blogs. It gets its data from a variety of places and is definitely a site you should go to for blog pinging. If you're adding Technorati tags to your posts, it will also give you multiple backlinks which can have a very high pagerank and thus will improve your site ranking in the search engines.

These are just 5 of the many different blog pinging services available. A quick search on Yahoo or Google will reveal many other possible blog pinging services to use for your blog. It is best to ping/sign up for as many as you possibly can to ensure that your blog is well-pinged.

A well-pinged blog will definitely help your blog attract more visitors because not only will you get direct visitors from these services but also valuable backlinks. And since these sites have a high authority with the search engines (meaning, most of them have high Google Pagerank), you can get easy and automatic backlinks from authority sites.

This is especially true when your links can be found on popular so called "TAG" pages. A tag is similar to a keyword. So ping as many many of these services as possible and watch your blog traffic increase.

P.S. You can enter a list of websites to ping e.g. within your Wordpress interface. You can find it listed under "options/writing"!

Tags: adsense, search engines, tags, technorati, traffic, websites

I am answering a new question here which I got from one of my subscribers. This answer is with regards to a promotion which I sent out for my Niche Content Websites membership site:

Hi,

I've had VRE for awhile now and was getting ready to put some sites up when Google came around with their last slap with the Adwords arbritrage thing. Many folks lost their Adwords account and many of them were pointing to their VRE sites.

With Google penalizing Adsense sites, like VRE, where there are just a few articles posted and tons of Adsense ads, how can anyone really use vre anymore? I know that Google isn't the only fish in the sea, but unless you use Adwords to get traffic, you are basically stuck with just writing articles, manual linking etc. Does not seem like a very good use of your time.

I am interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

Thanks,
Peter T.

—————————————–

My answer:

Hi Peter,

The abbreviation VRE in itself does not imply that these sites will get punished. Google did not punish real content sites with genuine articles and enough other links or ads to click on. What they did punish were sites which had NOTHING ELSE there but a bunch of links and no content whatsoever and two Adsense blocks at the top so this was the only thing people could see when they arrived on such a site. Most of them were sites built with so called portal builder softwares. I have more than 60 of these real article VRE sites online and I still have an active Adsense account.

And I don't agree that Adwords or Google Arbitrage is the only way of getting traffic. Things like Web 2.0 (Digg, Technorati, Squidoo, YouTube, Google Video, MySpace etc.) can have a HUGE impact on the number of visitors. Personally, I'm getting more visitors from using these techniques than from the search engines themselves. This is true especially for non-unique sites and content. The problem with it is that people are just too lazy to drive traffic to the sites.

They want to upload them as they are without changing anything and just put a link out there so the spiders come over and they can make money on autopilot. Sorry to be so blunt but it simply doesn't work that way. There IS work involved in making money from these kind of websites or all members of so called VRE websites would be making enough money to quit their jobs. The ones who are getting active in driving traffic to their sites are really enjoying a healthy income.

So I'm sorry to destroy a dream bubble that you can have some kind of push-button solution. Yes, you still need to get links, you still need to submit articles, you still need to make posts on related forums etc. etc. or these sites are collecting "digital dust" and no one will visit them!

Best regards,

Detlev Reimer

Tags: adsense, adwords, search engines, technorati, traffic, vre websites, web 2.0, websites

PART 2

4.) BLOG COMMENTS

Even though blog comments have received quite a lot of negative publicity in the recent past because of all the discussions about blog spamming and automated blog comment posters, it is still a viable way of getting one way backlinks quickly. But only if done correctly and if you adhere to certain posting rules. Then you will be able to use it as a way to attract exactly the kind of targeted visitors who are eager to buy your products.

How can you find those blogs?

Well, you can go to Google and type in "keyword blog" where keyword gets replaced by the keyword for your market e.g. "dog training blog". If you take this one step further, you could add something like "Powered by Wordpress" to this query and Google would find any Wordpress blog which has been making posts about dog training.

You could do the same query in Technorati.com, a service which most bloggers are pinging to notify them of new content. Meaning, you can find posts related to almost any keyword there. Doing this for many websites and then also checking if these blogs have enough traffic and/or pagerank can be quite time consuming.

If you value your time as much as me then you need to automate this. Personally, I am using a tool called CommentHut to find these blogs and show me the pagerank of each result. There simply is no quicker way. You still have to make comments related to the blog post, though. CommentHut won't do that for you. But its' goal is not to spam blogs but to find the best blogs to post to. Not only on Wordpress but also for 4 other blogging platforms like Typepad and even on Wordpress.com itself. This means, you can get free backlinks from an authority site like Wordpress.com because it also hosts personal blogs…

Not only can you get better search engine placement because of relevant blog comments but you also might get a lot of direct visitors if it's a busy blog. Ask a provocant question there or doubt something the blogger is pointing out and you can see that it can cause quite a stir which also means more direct visitors for you! And your blog links are in the middle of highly relevant, keyword rich content. It cannot get any better.

5.) ARTICLE SUBMISSIONS

Article marketing has been a secret weapon in the arsenal of many super affiliate marketers. Not only for improving their search engine positions but also for direct traffic from their article resource boxes (the small signature file at the end of each article). Imagine getting one of your articles picked up by a newsletter which has a readership in the hundreds of thousands… That could be a marketing breakthrough overnight.

Then why are not more people using it? Every week I see article after article talking about the effectiveness of getting your articles published on other websites and in other people's ezines. Are people too shy? Do they think they can't write? Are they afraid they are making too many mistakes?

If you don't do anything, you are not making mistakes - that's true… But you're also not making any progress. Most top marketers have become so successful because they were not afraid to make mistakes along the way. That is what Internet marketing is about: Learning from your experiences and improving upon them. If you'll keep doing the same things, you keep getting the same (bad) results. I'm sure you've heard this saying more than once and it's so true!

Take action and you'll see results.

Writing your own articles can be so easy. Just do a little bit of research in those all important article directories themselves. Do a search for your keyword and see what others have written about the subject. Combine several of other people's ideas and thoughts and write your own masterpieces in your own words. NEVER EVER COPY SOMEONE ELSE'S WORK!! This could get you in serious trouble. But rewriting ideas and thoughts is always allowed.

Whatever the reason is for not getting engaged in article writing, there is an answer to all of these objections.

Either outsource your article writing or use a piece of software called "Instant Article Wizard" which will let you write articles through a click and point process rather than having to come up with your own words. You'll still need to polish up the sentences and the structure the software produces but about 80-90% of the work is already done by this article writer software.

Outsourcing means that you go to a website like Elance.com or Scriptlance.com ( my favourite) to get these articles written for you - for a small fee (usually something between $5-10 a piece).

With these articles you get to own something unique that you can use

a.) as content on your site

b.) as article for your ezine

c.) as vehicle to get your search engine positions up

d.) to get your name spread and build a reputation for yourself

All you have to do after you've created these articles is to submit them to article directories. It can be done manually if you visit a page where all of these article directories are listed e.g. here:

http://www.arcanaweb.com/resources/article-directories.html

But it can take you days if not weeks to get this done one by one.

Or you can use an article submitter. Personally, I like Jeff Alderson's Instant Article Submitter because with his software, you can also choose the categories your article gets submitted to. This ensures that your article is assigned the correct category rather than submitting a generic format where 50% of the times, you'll get declined by the article directory owner because of not having selected the correct category…

Article marketing is still one of the best and most cost effective ways to get your products sold, get recognized in your market and get better search engine positions - all from the power of articles. With article marketing or "bum marketing" as it has been called in recent times, you can even make sales if you have no website, no list and no JV partners.

With which other method can you achieve this so easily…?

CONCLUSION:

Generally speaking, the search engines seem to favor non-reciprocal links so try to focus on those and don't overdo reciprocal linking. These two way links should not make up more than 25-30% of your total links in order to stay on the safe side.

Set up a schedule to check your ranking in the major search engines frequently to see if your link popularity has improved. Of course, this is not achievable in the blink of an eye. It will take some time and a good deal of work. There is no way around the labor-intensive quality of improving your link popularity, which is why search engines regard it with such importance.

By the way - make sure you have a great looking, content rich website or you will never persuade anyone to link back to you - not even free directory owners. Try to avoid having your website cluttered with Adsense and ads all over the pages before asking for a link. Once you have got enough links (when you have achieved your desired search engine positions for your main keywords or your pagerank), you can add your ads back and enjoy the profits from your hard work…

Download this complete article as a PDF report - refer to it any time:

5 Amazingly Easy Ways To Get Top 10 Listings in Google, Yahoo and MSN

END OF ARTICLE

Tags: adsense, affiliate, internet marketing, major search engines, search engines, technorati, traffic, websites

PART 1

Search engines are the gateway to the Internet - in most cases they are the first tools that potential customers use to find the products and services they need. Without at least one backlink, you will not get listed in any search engine! This is true even if you've submitted your website on their "Add URL" pages (is not necessary, though… the search engine spiders will find your link automatically if it can be found on at least one popular domain). And the more links you are getting and the more often other websites are using your keywords when they do mention your website, the better you will rank for your keywords.

This is why link popularity is so imperative. If customers do not find your website, you have no possibilities of making any sales…

You're probably wondering what the blazes is popular about a link! Well, in a word - plenty! Link popularity refers to the ranking assigned to your website by the search engines, and it determines the ranking your page gets when keywords are entered into a search engine. Google uses the term "Pagerank" for this - the more backlinks you have for your site, the higher the "Google Pagerank" (between 1-10 with 10 being the most valuable PR).

So how do you make your link "popular"?

Search engines are discretionary, giving status and ranking to sites that have links to their pages from related, quality sites. It's a simple formula, but a very important one. Google created the system, and now virtually all the most popular search engines employ it to rank your web pages in their indexes.

The more commonly used your keyword is, the harder it will be to achieve link popularity, but without achieving this step, it is almost certain your site will never rank highly on any search engine. But don't get discouraged; there are tried and true ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords even though it will take you longer than if you just take a step back and go for the less competetive phrases.

There are a few things you should be aware of. The first is that just linking up with a large number of other websites will not give your site link popularity. In fact, it may have quite the opposite effect. This is particularly true when pertaining to websites that are nothing more than "link farms" - pages containing line after line of indiscriminate links. Search engines may aggressively discriminate against your website if you are associated with a link farm, so steer clear of them!

The next thing to bear in mind is the quality of the site you are linking to. Never link to a page you have
reservations about your visitors seeing (e.g. spammy websites with no real content). The last thing you want your website to appear as is indiscriminate and cheap. This is what is called linking to a "bad neighbourhood". Linking to sites of poor quality will only lessen your link popularity, if not completely destroy it (lose your pagerank).

So let's get to what you need to do to achieve supreme link popularity and get top 10 rankings on all the major search engines:

1.) DIRECTORY SUBMISSIONS

One of the first things you should always do is to get listings in as many of the free web directories as possible. Personally, I think that a listing in Yahoo is too expensive with almost $300 per year for a business related site (which is the case when you want to make a profit off your site and who doesn't want that?). There are a lot of other websites where you can get listed for a smaller fee or for free so I don't bother getting listed there. Dmoz.org, the most important free web directory you can get into, gives you a free listing whether you are business-related or non-commercial, but be prepared to make a lot of follow-up inquiries before you see your site listed. It can take months…

You are aiming to get listed in the highest level of an appropriate category, and this just takes some common sense. For example, if your company ships "Alpaca wool" from an Alpaca farm located in the middle of Nowhere, Tiny State, do NOT submit your listing to "Retailers from Nowhere, Tiny State." BIG MISTAKE! All you have to do is look a little deeper - and submit your listing to the "Fine Alpaca Wool" category. You will not only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you will be listed in a national category.

When adding your link text into the form, make sure that you are using the keywords that you want to get your high search engine rankings for!

2.) RECIPROCAL LINKS

The next step after you have attained directory listings is to locate other quality sites that will increase your link popularity. Try to find sites that are in some way related to yours, so not only will your link popularity increase, but your customer base may also be expanded. You want to avoid your competitors and look for sites that are useful to your site's visitors. Let's look at the Alpaca Wool site example.

Linking up to a site that sells knitting supplies would be helpful to your visitors, and the chances of the knitting supply site wanting to link up to your site are also greater. By linking to a related site that will be relevant to your website's traffic, you are increasing both of your site's business prospects - and both of your sites' link popularity. Look which sites WANT to exchange links. Obviously, sites with no link partner page are not interested in exchanging links.

Contact sites where you can find a links page and tell them that you've added their link to your site (you need to add their link first if you want them to consider linking back to you!) and if they want to reciprocate. Do not go over the top with this by sending out thousands of generic link requests. Only send requests to website owners of sites you have visited and considered great partners.

The best way to do this reciprocal linking is to go to Google and do a search for e.g. intitle:"add url" +inurl:"your keyword here". What this does is that it checks for the title of the page and looks if it has the "Add URL" phrase there and the second part checks if your keyword appears in their URL. To stay with the above example, you would look for "wool" or "knitting". Most sites which have "Add URL" in their title will gladly exchange links with you and probably have a reciprocal links manager script in place. This way, you'll get listed on their links page automatically as soon as a backlink on your site is found.

Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find (spread over days and weeks, not hours…), bearing in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. Too many backlinks in too little time will trigger a spam filter with most search engines. For example, it would not be normal for a site to start with 0 backlinks when it is spidered by the search engines and have 3500 backlinks 3 days later. Do not focus on reciprocal links alone but try to get more one way backlinks through the other methods mentioned in this article.

3.) SOCIAL BOOKMARKING AKA „TAGGING“

Social bookmarking websites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links. In a similar way like you save your bookmarks in your web browser, you are able to save bookmarks on these special websites. You can "tag" your links meaning you can assign keywords to your posts and content in general.
Other than web page bookmarks, services specialized to a specific subject or format - feeds, books, videos, music, shopping items, map locations, wineries, etc. - can be found. Social bookmarking is also part of Social News Sites like Reddit.

In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are either accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags (see folksonomy). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given "tags", and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

Its increasing popularity and competition have extended the services to offer more than just sharing bookmarks, such as rating, commenting, the ability to import and export, add notes, reviews, email links, automatic notification, feed subscription, web annotation, create groups and social networks.

These sites are also meant when people are talking about this Web 2.0 thing.

Web 2.0 means websites for a community of people, social networks, and these people rate and tag content rather than a search engine or some automated solution ( Sites like Flickr.com and YouTube.com belong into that category as well). This way, the relevance of content gets determined by real people as opposed to having some search engine apply algorithms and get results which are not always suitable.

That’s why Digg.com claims:

“Digg is all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote stuff that's important to you!”

Popular social bookmarking sites are e.g.:

http://www.technorati.com/ (it’s also a blog directory)
http://www.digg.com/
http://de.licio.us/
http://www.reddit.com/
http://www.furl.net/

and dozens of others. More and more sites like these come up on a daily basis and only the future will show which ones will get as popular as the ones mentioned above.

END OF PART 1

Tags: adsense, digg.com, major search engines, search engines, seo, social bookmarking, social bookmarking sites, tagging, tags, technorati, traffic, web 2.0, websites

Some months ago a young guy from Thailand by the name of Sean Wu revealed what some big name gurus have been quietly doing for years already to get almost immediate traffic to their sites and to get them noticed by the search engine spiders. Of course, I am talking about Tag and Ping…

What exactly is Tag and Ping?

You may have heard the term Blog and Ping before. That’s a method which was a perfect way to get the search engine spiders coming to your site very quickly. I say “was” because it has become less effective than it was 2 years ago. The search engines do not value blogs that much anymore if they are pinging the blog directories extensively. But you can still get permanent links on these sites if you submit your site to their directories using a tool like my Blog Promoter.

Tagging is another, similar way to drive laser targeted traffic to a website. Basically, tagging means that you want your posts to appear on social bookmarking sites (sites to organize your bookmarks online) under certain keywords or categories aka. “Tags”.

Apart from social bookmarking sites there are a kind of hybrid sites as they combine social bookmarking with blog posts. The most popular site in this category is Technorati.com. As these sites have thousands of regular visitors looking for regularly updated content, it is a much faster way to get traffic to your website than waiting to get listed in the search engines.

What are the benefits of Tag and Ping?

• it’s free

• not too complicated

• you don’t have to buy additional software to do it

• you can get high PR backlinks to your website

• almost immediate traffic to your site

Unfortunately, some spammers have been using these techniques to such an extent that several social bookmarking sites had to take countermeasures to protect their integrity.

So it’s important that you don’t use it an unethical manner like Sean Wu suggested in his ebook (by means of creating multiple profiles for each of these sites). This will destroy the effectiveness of that method. But used ethically, Tag and Ping and the use of social bookmarking sites in general is a great long-term strategy and will enable you to achieve permanent and long term exposure for your websites and blogs if you’re playing by the rules.

Click here if you want to learn more about Tag and Ping

…

Tags: adsense, ebook, search engines, social bookmarking, social bookmarking sites, tag and ping, tagging, tags, targeted traffic, targeted traffic, technorati, traffic, websites