• Get a new website indexed with the various search engines quickly
• Position an existing website better in the search engine results.
• Keep a good performing website competitive.

Each of these can benefit from the blog and ping combo.

Now, you may have heard or read about this before, but 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.

For these reasons, online marketers 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.

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 that will 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 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 www.my.yahoo.com .

Now It’s Time To The Ping
Once your www.my.yahoo.com is set up, every time you’d post a new entry on your blog, you’ll have to go to 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.

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 days. And with Yahoo picking up your website, and with 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.