You may have a new website you want to get indexed with the various search engines at the soonest possible time. Or you may have an existing website which you want to position well in the search engine results. Or you may have a good performing website which you want to remain competitive. Whatever your reason may be, you're sure to benefit from the blog and ping combo.



Now, you may have heard or read about this before, but your never realized how it works. Or this may be the first time you have been acquainted with this surefire technique. Regardless, much can be learned from this article as we discuss 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 it as online diaries where they could post their thoughts, the events of their days, their secret desires and the likes. 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 it could become 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. Preferably, you should create an account with http://www.blogger.com , because 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 have to 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 that would allow you to broadcast any changes on your blog to subscribed systems. This is actually the heart of the blog-ping combo. You have to learn how to syndicate your RSS feeds.

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 could 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 http://www.my.yahoo.com . Simply create a Yahoo account, then go to the said page. Find the ADD RSS button, then press on the same. Then paste the URL of your RSS feeds.

Every time you'd update your blog, RSS feeds would be generated and displayed in http://www.my.yahoo.com .

Now It's Time To The Ping

Once your http://www.my.yahoo.com is set up, every time you'd post a new entry on your blog, you'll have to go to http://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 would 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.

Again, you have to do this every time you will post a new entry. No exceptions!

How powerful is the blog-ping combo?

Your new website will get indexed in Yahoo within 5 days. This is guaranteed! And with Yahoo picking up your website, and with http://www.blogger.com being owned by Google, it wouldn't be long until the world's most widely used search engine would index 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?

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