Photographers Handbook

Published by Cris Mitchell

So you’ve just spent a half-day writing your latest and greatest blog post, you hit submit and then wait for your throngs of blog fans to come racing to your site to read it… and … nobody shows up.

There is an often-overlooked step in the blogging process that will help drive traffic to your blog. You need to notify the various blogging search engines that you have new content waiting to be indexed. There are probably at least a hundred different blogging search engines but really only a handful of them you should concern yourself with. Even if you pick the top 20-30 manually updating each of them can quickly become a pain.

I come bearing a solution.

PINGING SERVICES
There are several websites on the internet that have aggregated these search engines into a nice tidy online application that allows you to check the sites you want your blog submitted to. My favorite is pingoat.com and I’ll show you below just how easy it is to use.

There are several alternatives to pingoat.com which I’ll list as well, just find the one that works best for you and add this routine to your daily blogging habits, it only takes an extra two minutes and if it can help drive traffic to your blog it’s worth it.

WORD OF WARNING
Don’t think that if you ping the search engines more than once per day you are going to get better results, to the contrary doing so may end up getting your blog blacklisted. Once per day is plenty.

PINGOAT.COM
All the services work pretty much the same, below is a screen capture of pingoat.com. As you can see all you need to do is add your Blog Title, Blog URL and your RSS Feed (not mandatory). Once you’ve done that you select the search engines you would like to submit to by checking the box next to the name.

I typically only submit to the engines under the General section and you can easily check all by just clicking on the word General (it’s all about saving a few seconds here and there). Once your ready just select the Go Pingoat Button and your off to the races or the feed line (keeping with the goat metaphor), in seconds you’ll get a report back confirming all of the successful pings, if some were unsuccessful you can go back and check just those services and try re pinging them.

It’s just that simple! Taking this extra step will definitely pay off in the end.

OTHER SERVICES
Like I said earlier there are several services to choose from when it comes to pinging, pingoat.com just seems to work for me, your free to try others let me know what you like in the comments.

• Pingomatic.com
• autopinger.com
• pingmyblog.com
• kping.com
• feedshark.com
• pingates.com
• ping.in

Apr 30, 2009
Filed under: BLOGGING, INTERNET TOOLS, SEO, Auto Pinging, Blog Search, Pingoat.com, Search Engine Optimization, SEO