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There seems to be a huge craze lately with everyone trying to blog and ping to get their websites indexed into the search engines. Although this can be a great tool, all marketers should first understand exactly what they’re getting themselves into before starting.

This article is to serve as a beginners guide to getting started with blogging and pinging.

1. What is a blog?

A “blog” is short for “web log.” A web log is an online diary or journal. The main aspect blog is that it is frequently updated - at least once a week, sometimes every day or even more.

Since blogs are regularly updated, they tend to carry more value than regular static HTML pages (in some cases).

2. What is a ping?

A ping is a program that sends out a brief request for a response from another computer or server. When you ping on the Internet, you send out a program to see if a remote server is responding.

3. How do bloggers use pings?

Two main reasons to use pings with blogs: First and foremost is to let the search engines know that you have updated your website so they can send their spiders.

Secondly, pings also update the websites on the internet who are using your blog on their site (through a feature called RSS feeds, they are displaying your messages on their site).

4. So what is the big deal about blogging and pinging?

Smart affiliate marketers use blogging and pinging to help get their sites crawled and indexed by the search engine spiders a lot quicker than they normally would.

They set up a blog either on their main site or on a sub-domain of their site. They then post links to their product pages on their blog and send out a ping to all the major servers on the Internet.

That ping says “This site has fresh content, time to go add it to your database!” It’s a trigger that sends the search spiders looking for updated pages on your site. When they find the new pages, search engines tend to index them much faster.

Blogging and pinging will not get you into EVERY search engine overnight. As of this writing, it is most effective with getting into Yahoo. But often MSN, and even Google, will follow in short order.

Combine blogging and pinging with good link recruiting for the best indexing.

Also, blog and ping on a regular basis if you want to “stay” indexed in the search engines.

6. Is blogging and pinging a requirement to get indexed?

No. You can get indexed quickly by getting plenty of natural backlinks. But for backlinks to be most effective, they have to appear as if they were natural and this can take weeks if not months. Blogging and pinging does seem to drastically shorten the process.

7. Is there a downside to blogging and pinging?

Yes, some marketers are starting to abuse this strategy and the engines are getting wise to it! If you go over-board you risk getting your website completely banned and removed.

Also, many marketers are blogging and pinging for a few days and then forgetting about the website - your website will likely be de-indexed if you do not continue to naturally blog and ping.

The bottom line is that blogging and pinging is a great strategy right now to help you get your website indexed faster. However, the old natural way of getting incoming links is still the best and most assured way - not to mention the long-term benefits of having incoming links.

If you have not yet started blogging and pinging, I suggest you start with a practice website first, not your main website.

Copyright 2005 Kurma Group

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Okay so now we know content is king. And of course since we are creating our own blogs, (remember blogs is short slang for Weblogs - which is what their “formal and official” name is), most of our information is going to be “unique” and “Original”. Yet every now and then, since we are only human, and since we simply cannot “create” more and more information, we will copy information from other web sites. That is cool. There is no problem with that, UNLESS, you decide that “copying” and/or “linking” is simply better and forego writing anything.

Now let me make this clear. If you are offering a service to people, where your main business is to offer out links to other places where people can get information, in other words you are a repository where people come to get links, because you already did all the research - that is fine. Because what you will loose in content, you will make up in “eyeballs” and “hits”. Remember the end result of good search engine listings is just that. MORE HITS - MORE EYEBALLS - MORE PEOPLE VISITING. And content is not the only parameter an Search Engine looks at. Not by a long shot.

This is a critical point to keep in mind. Everything we will talk about, every method, from content to email to lists to whatever, (hehe my most unfavorite word in the English language pops in - Whatever - see my post on that word in my blog), has but one goal in mind. To consistently and constantly increase and build your website “hits”. To make sure you have an ever-growing “fan” club “motivated” because of the service you are offering, to come back. So please differentiate between the end goal and the methods. Content (discussed in our first article) is a method towards the goal of getting listed in a good position on a search engine, and the goal is to have people use and come to your web site or blog, and create a “buzz” about it. (We will talk about this much later in our series.)

Let us go back to content for a moment. Here we are talking about something that all writers know about and are familiar with. Text, words, phrases. Original, unique text.

So in order to continue on our own fairly logical path, we will now concentrate on the “text” and what has to be in it. Which brings us to the subject of “keywords”. Before explaining just what these are and either their importance or total invalidity and worthlessness these days, (and this is up for debate) let us define keywords more carefully.

If you have a website selling hair beauty aids, you will want to sell your material writing content around what you are selling. Obviously if you write something about the difference between different models of dishwashers, this is not going to relate to the “subject matter” and content of your site. So you will write articles around your hair supplies. You will write articles on good hair care, on how to dye your hair, how to get rid of split-ends, how often to shampoo etc. etc.

Our magic hair website is called “Hair Is Not Forever”, and it is at www.hairisnotforever.com (I have no clue if such a site exists so please don’t try that link!) But this is our site for now and we will keep it as we go along. hairisnotforever also has a blog. This blog we will call “SilkyFairHair” and we will put it, for the sake of our example in blogger.com under the name of the proprietor who is aptly named Mr. Nor Hair. So now we have as follows:

1. Web Site - Hair Forever @ www.hairisnotforever.com (this URL is fictional)

2. Blog - SilkyFairHair @ http://norhair.bl.com (this URL is fictional)

These names ARE important and so are the URL’s. (URL stands for Universal Resource Locater). So keep them in mind as we go along through these articles especially when I get to the article on the importance of finding the right name.

So Mr. Nor Hair and his wife, Mrs. Purple Hair work together. They create the site, get all the necessary stuff to sell something on it, write a couple of articles about hair and sit back and wait for the people to come beating their “virtual” door down. Well as we say in Hebrew, “Boker Tov” (which literally means “Good Morning”), or as you say in English, “Knock. Knock. Good Morning! Anyone Home?”

Okay the Hair couple know about keywords. So they create articles in which EVERY sentence has the word hair in it (or balding). But hair is the name of the game. They make sure their content is original, and once they have written two HTML pages of hair articles, strategically placed by their cousin the graphic artist (who is bald) around the advertisements for hair products and now they think they are done!

Woah! Not by a LONG SHOT! And here is where it gets depressing for the uninitiated and non-dedicated people.

Let us deal with the “keyword” issue.
Keywords are like indices or if you wish, categories. A keyword is something that the search engine will look for and validate (in our day), to use as one of the parameters as to how to list your site.

The keywords we refer to are in two distinct and totally different places. The first in the page header of the site.
in what is known as the section for “meta” tags. We will deal with meta tags in a different article, however let us just say these are the keywords most search engine look for (with their “bots”) when visiting your site.
An example meta tag for keywords on our site may look like this:

< BLOCKQUOTE>< META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="hair, hair products, hair grooming, baldness, going bald, shampoo, conditioner, hair color, dying hair, split-ends, split ends, hair life, beautiful hair, luxurious hair">

Again in our article(s) on meta tags we will discuss these keywords, and meta tags, but for now take it as a given these are some of the keywords that will be in the meta tag.

When the Search Engine technology first became popular and meta tags were implemented, the keywords tag was critical. Search Engines looked at the keywords in the meta tag and assumed that was what the site was about and listed the site under those keywords. This was caught on to immediately, and humans being the crafty devils they are, began listing keywords that had nothing to do with their sites in order to drive traffic to the site. (Remember - the end result is the oh-so-important one: Hits & Eyeballs)

So porn sites especially, adopting this as yet another “fool the engine” technique, would put keywords like “hair”, “technology” etc. into their meta tags, and give the site an innocuous name and voila, more traffic.

So in the never-ending battle Search Engines caught on, and did a few things. They deprecated the importance of the keywords in the meta tags according to their algorithms, UNLESS the content on the site actually did match the keywords. Of course, this was not enough as porn sites will put “real” content around their stuff. I will give you a REAL example which I find funny, but it is very serious.

In one of my posts on my blog, you can see my bio which is picked up by search engines. The other day I received an email from an old flame of mine saying “I freaked out. I googled you, under Ted Gross Writer, and you are connected with a site about tushy’s!” So I go and Google it, and sure enough in like the fifth position is this: “Ted Gross’s Unofficial Bio - The Real Version by Tushy” and of course I click and get led to another site (no url here as I do not want to publicize that site for obvious reasons) and I come to a porn site which ripped off, out of all the content on the internet, MY profile to place around their porn adverts. UGH! But you see that is how crafty people are!

(Here we are not going to talk about “splogs” - meaning “spam blogs” yet. But keep it in mind.)

Okay now what happens - not in theory but in practice.

Two scenarios:

1. You have keywords in your meta tag (and you should have them!) The little Search Engine “bot” (that is a software program whose job it is to travel around the Internet, never sleeps and never eats and gets into all those porn sites too!, and picks up information on ALL sites so the information can be categorized), comes to our site of hairisnotforever and reads the keywords on the page. Then this little bot makes a snapshot of the web page. Then the algorithms take over and match the keywords in the meta tags to the text and stuff on your site. (Remember Search Engines don’t “see”, they are NOT visual (males are visually oriented not Search Engines!) so graphics are not taken into account unless you use the alt tag.) The algorithms get more and more sophisticated as time goes on and they look for content, keywords, phrases etc. (Remember original content!)

2. You have no keywords in your meta tag so the engine just looks at your content.

So our happy couple figures okay lets put the word hair say, in every sentence at least three times. NO! Don’t do that. Overuse of a keyword is a red-flag to a Search Engine and you will be penalized for it! It should be used and used frequently, but NOT overused.

Now when you Google for hair products using the word “balding”, the Search Engine has the keyword, and based upon a million parameters decides what position for that specific keyword, hairisnotforever will have, and feeds it out.

So our couple figures what the hell. We will also sell mascara, and they put in a picture advert and the word mascara in their keywords, without having any content for it. Well then www.hairisnotforever.com will probably be listed as the last of the last of the last for anyone looking for “mascara”.
So for this lesson the formula is:

“Content+Keywords in the content+Keywords in Meta tag.”

Copyright 2006 Ted W. Gross. All rights reserved. (You may publish this article in its entirety with the following author’s information with live links only.)
Ted W. Gross’s very popular blog, Cobwebs Of The Mind contains daily updated posts and articles on technology and writing. He also owns Amor Enterprises which maintains Virgin Earth Article Submissions which is designed to accept articles about any country or place in the world. Ted Gross is also a published author and maintains a web site for his works.

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Since we are on the subject of linking to and from your blogs, and ostensibly this whole series was started with the discussion on links on our minds, (due to the discussion about Technorati rankings), it is not far-fetched to now devote an article or two on the effects of linking and bona fide strategies to get more links without being penalized or worse by the Search Engines.

It is necessary to understand that there are certain “linking strategies” which are no longer looked upon kindly by the Search Engines (and even many surfers). On the by-and-by I will mention these “bad” strategies in my articles. However, right now we will just mention the most blatant ones. And we will begin with the negative.

It is often the case that when we are starting out and looking for links, that we consider “link banks” or “link farms”. The ones that particularly a waste of times and money are those that will “for a small fee” charge you money to use them. Here is how they work.

You go into a link-farm and they maintain a database full of customers just like yourself. If they are halfway tech-savvy they will also categorize their links so that you can link to other web-sites that are within your “sphere”. You go to the categories that interest you, and you click on those web-sites that seem to be related in content to yours. The system then sends out an automated email to the webmasters of those sites telling them of your link-exchange request. The webmaster can either approve or decline. This is fairly simple. What is supposed to happen then, is that you and the Webmaster of the chosen site put up “reciprocal links”. You link to them - they link to you. You give them a “hot-link/back-link” to their site they give one to you. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Well… First and foremost you have just bled out another link. Okay not so bad, unless you constantly do this. A site with too many “bleeding links” and almost no content is marked as a spam site. One which simply puts links up to other sites, adds the keywords, some junk content and tries to move up in the Search Engine ranking. BTW..this works. It works and works well. For a couple of weeks until the Search Engines get around to actually botting, caching and running their algorithms on your site. Then you are penalized or simply thrown to the back of the line.

But there is a very cagey thing these link-farms do as well. What they offer you is either free link exchange or for a few bucks more you get the PRO edition. The Pro edition allows you to put all your reciprocal links into a database and whenever someone accesses your site these links are fed out in pages. Lots and lots of people, newbies usually, go for the PRO option. After all for $30 every couple of months, they don’t have to add to their HTML every time a new link is agreed upon. They just add it to the program database which takes care of the rest. The thing is then they are not bleeding links as the information is held on a central server (not on their own servers) and I challenge anyone here who knows of these farms to Google search your link on their site. You just won’t find it. So while you being conservative, and you don’t pay that extra “small” charge, add a link to your HTML every time your request is approved, most of these people are just adding a link ostensibly coming from their site, into a centralized database. They get your link, you get almost NADA. And since there is no overhead for them, they willingly and happily will add thousands of links. Go find YOUR site among those thousands of links in one web site. Who do you know, is going to flip through a few hundred link pages reading every one?

That is just one of the negative aspects. So the rule here is:
“Stay away from commercial link-farms and link-exchanges - they are a NO-NO!”

Okay so how do you get “good” and “valid” links into your Blog?

1. Lots of Hard work
2. Technorati as we have already discussed is one way. (No need to repeat - read articles 2 and 3 in this series)


3. Links between friends - this works there is a give and take here, and it spreads. You would be surprised how good this option works. My AW friends do this routinely, and we are all writers. I gladly link to fellow AW sites even if they don’t give me a “reciprocal” link. Cause that is what friends are for and that is the community.


4. Targeted Email - This we will discuss in one of our next articles and I think you will be surprised as to how well this works. For now let me say these few things about Email - Targeted Email.
   A) I own quite a few web sites and deal with blogs. I can tell you that based upon real-time statistics if a targeted email to a targeted audience goes out, the hits on the site I am targeting, jump in the hundreds of percents within the next 24 hour period. People who WANT email will read it.
   B) How do you get a targeted email list? First off you must spread the word. Forums, article submission sites (a very good option), friends, family, the stunning woman next door who you were always to shy to talk to, (hey don’t laugh I am SHY!), Internet buddies. Remember you are starting from scratch here. You are new to this whole world, its lingo, its etiquette and its rules. Take anything you can get and keep it and treasure it as if it were gold.
   C) NEVER THROW AWAY AN EMAIL ADDRESS.
   D) NEVER SELL YOUR LIST OR LET SOMEONE ELSE BORROW IT. AND GUARANTEE THAT TO YOUR READERS AS WELL!
   E) Targeted Email lists take time and effort but they are your best option. Your BEST option for new sites.


5. Implementing RSS feeds - we will discuss these later (but if you are impatient you can read my series of RSS articles here at EzineArticles, just click on here or on my Name to see my articles on RSS.)


6. Word of Mouth - if it spreads it works… PERIOD (No email no nothing. Just BUZZ. Create the buzz. You must market your own site, cause if you don’t no one is going to come to it!) This is a lot like writing and having your first book published. Once it is published, the real work begins. You have to market the book. Sell it. Autograph it. Talk about it. Until you are nauseated from it and wish you never learned how to write. But you have to do it!


7. Offer something that is WORTHWHILE for your audience - and make sure you update it constantly and consistently. Take my blog for example. I made it generic. BUT I wanted to get out some thoughts on writing and living etc. And I do that and continue to do that. However, my background gives me some fairly good expertise in a few other areas as well. This is also great practice in writing. So I combine that expertise with my writing.. and voila. Don’t only write about some events in your life. As much as that is important to you, very few people will want to read it. Give people knowledge, something they want something that ONLY you can give them. And be damn good at what you do. On one hand the famed phrase goes from P. T. Barnum: “A sucker is born every minute” on the other hand “Never underestimate the intelligence of your audience”. Most people are a hell of a lot smarter and more intuitive than we give them credit for.


8. Work hard on Good Search Engine listing and ranking
   Use the options, tools and ideas you read here and elsewhere. Pick and choose what is good and works for you. Don’t discount anything, until you tried it. Works, that is great. Don’t work - dump it like a rotten tomato.


9. Advertise with Google Ad Sense and Yahoo (Overture)
   One of the few times I will actually suggest spending money. But be careful and wary. Keep close track on what works and what does not work. Follow your budget closely. Change your adverts to meet demand and what works and what does not work. Use catch phrases - be savvy. People come to the site - deliver on your advert. You have less than 5 seconds to get their attention. Use those 5 seconds to the maximum!


10. Offering Freebies - Sometimes this works sometimes it is just garbage. Depends on your site and what you are selling or offering. E-Books are almost passe, I would not go that route. I know an incredible amount of people, and I have yet to meet one person, who has told me they actually read those free e-books which are basically personal blogs in PDF format. Most of them are simply snares and pitches, full of the worst writing and junk imaginable. They tell you how to get rich in 10 minutes or how to make a million bucks on the net - if only you send them another $100 bucks for their secret! Like I said before “a sucker is born every minute!” However e-books on health, herbal remedies etc. are all the rage. They offer INFORMATION or KNOWLEDGE. You may want to consider those if they fit into your site’s content and genre.


11. An Incredible Amount of Patience - Be patient. You dont gain 1000 links to your site in a week!


12. More Hard work - need I say more?

I am sure I left out a few things (or maybe more than a few), which I will get to in the future.

Copyright © 2006 Ted W. Gross. All rights reserved. (You may publish this article in its entirety with the following author’s information with live links only.)
Ted W. Gross’s very popular blog, Cobwebs Of The Mind contains daily updated posts and articles on technology and writing. He also owns Amor Enterprises which maintains Virgin Earth Article Submissions which is designed to accept articles about any country or place in the world. Ted Gross is also a published author and maintains a web site for his works.

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