Pinging to the Bank – How to Increase Blog Traffic
Now some of us may have heard of the word “pinging” in relation to learning how to increase blog traffic, but for most of us this is just a funny word that we think of when we flicked our brother or sisters in the back of the head when they were being ridiculous. In all actuality this word is one of a blogger’s biggest weapons when used correctly. Basically what pinging does is notifies search engines that you have updated your blog. It notifies search engines that you have “new” and “fresh” content, and helps you possibly get bumped up higher in search engine ranking which results in more views, and more traffic to your blog. Now let’s go into the steps of how to increase your blog traffic by pinging your blog!
First and foremost we want to set our blog to be able to pick up what we’re doing automatically for us. Now I do want to emphasize not all blogs, unfortunately, can do this for you, but the two blog services that I use the most, do. So for the sake of time we’ll talk about these two which are WordPress and Blogger. These two blogging sites have their own pinging tools built into them which saves us a lot of time and publishes the post for you as soon as you post each entry. For WordPress all you have to do is go into your admin control panel, go to settings, and then pinging and then just add a list of places where you like to ping to. There is a plug-in called a “smart Update Pinger” that you can upload from WordPress that makes this whole process virtually hands off. In Blogger it’s just the step of making sure that “let search engines find your blog” is highlighted yes in the dropdown box inside your settings. Now, let’s talk about the second thing we need to do in learning how to increase blog traffic.
When your blogs are set up correctly we need to make sure that our newly written posts are being identified when they are written. There are several different pinging services to use, but we’re just going to talk about my favorite two. These sites are pingoat.com, and pingomatic.com. These sites are very easy to understand and will notify several sites that you have new content and are huge tools for us when we are learning how to increase blog traffic. I do want to emphasize that you only want to choose one of them to alleviate a “double pinging” effect. Search engines (especially Google) don’t like this and will not give you as much of a priority. When you get to either one of these sites just fill in the basic information along with inserting the URL of your blog into the given space and then click Ping. It’s really that simple!
Now, the idea behind pinging is staying consistent and whenever you write a new post go to your pinging site of choice and repeat as necessary!