Pinging to get traffic

Pinging is the method of announcing to the wider web community that you have updated a blog or website.

Unlike RSS which offers an updated service to sites that link via rss, pinging is a one time deal. But the smart ones amongst us automate this with a plugin on our blog.

A definition of RSS is :
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

Pinging however is more or less the same as submitting your site to the search engines with a few notable differences

1. You ping the blog search engines every time you update your blog. However a website submission is a specific request to the search engines to index that site

2. Because blogs are time-sensitive in nature, this indexing happens much more often than occurs on a standard web site

Blog content changes frequently and as such provides fresh web content which is why blogs generally rank high in the search engine rankings. Fresh content that is relevent for the search terms of the post submitted gives the Search engines more to offer based upon the search request of the end user.

Now you don’t just go and index your blog with a website submission service everytime you post as that would cost you a fortune over time. A single submission service can cost $30 a time, which is outside the means of most modest bloggers. So there are specific free pinging services that when automated in word press makes this a snap, and free which makes it better still.

So the question is who do you submit to and how do you go about setting that up in WordPress. O.K first things first you have to have the required plugin that does the actual work.

This can be obtained for free at the following website -

http://ultimateplugins.com/smart-update-pinger/

It takes about 2 minutes to fill in the required details and download the plugin. Once its downloaded use an FTP program to upload the file to your Wp-content/plugins folder. Go to your WP blog admin and activate the plugin and thats it.

Now everytime you post a new item to your blog the pinging services are notified and in a short period of time so then are the search engines. Which over time will drive traffic from those search engines directly to your blog which is what we all want.

I Hope you are having a rewarding 2009 and until the next time, take care.

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