Years ago, in a dimly lit living room Peter Hoggan started talking to me about blog and ping as a way of increasing website visibility. To be honest it was late, I’d just driven home from the other side of the country and all I wanted to do was get a pint or ten. But the idea behind ‘blog and ping’ is what is driving much of the blog based Search Engine Optimization. Blog and ping is simply that when your blog updates it automatically informs other websites that your content has updated, they send out the spiders and update their index - no more do you have to wait and hope that the search engines will find your new content. In the modern age of Web2.0 getting your blog heard through the noise can be difficult but using your ping functionality effectively and sparingly can work best. Like all things to do with online marketing do too much and you could be penalised for ’spamming’.

Where should your blog ping?

1. Pingomatic: In WordPress your blog is set up to ping Pingomatic by default. Pingomatic tell 16 sites (it can tell more if you have a podcast) that your blog has updated. These are:
   • Weblogs.com
   • FeedBurner
   • MyYahoo!
   • BlogRolling
   • We Blog Alot
   • Topic Exchange
   • Blo.gs
   • Syndic8
   • PubSub
   • Blog Street
   • IceRocket
   • Technorati
   • News Gator
   • BlogDigger
   • MoreOver
   • News Is Free

   Of this list Technorati has some nice bits and pieces so get over there and claim your blog. If your blog is not pinging automatically go over to Pingomatic and enter your details will do exactly the same thing as your blog should be.

2. Google: for once Google isnt the core place you should ping but its still hugely important and Google Blog Search can bring good traffic if you know what to target in it. In your Ping list put ‘http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2′. If again you’re not pinging you can request a URL and it’ll deliver the same results. Instructions for forming this page request can be found at http://www.google.com/help/blogsearch/pinging_API.html. Its at the bottom of the page under the heading “Setting up a REST client”. The important thing is that by pinging Google you’ll get GoogleBot to come and spider your site more quickly. North South Media did find an exception to this.
3. That’s it to be honest. The thirs place I think you should check out, if you are interested in getting your pings going and want to ping everywhere on the planet (and for some of you all the links this may generate could be too tempting to pass up) is to use the list over at Boyd Of Ayrshire. Its where I started my delving into pinging and some of the ping locations listed could be right for your niche blog.

If you know of any other websites that people should be pinging - either via the built in XML request built into WordPress or by URL let us know in the comments below.