As
a new webmaster, you might have waited and waited for your website
to be indexed by the search engines. Maybe
Google or Yahoo's spider came by your website once or twice,
indexed your main page but never did a "deep crawl",
which means visiting and indexing the rest of your website's
pages. Believe it or not, this is what usually happens to websites
within the first month of being online.
What
if you had hundreds of fresh content pages just lying around
on your website, all linked properly through your top-down menu
structure, and had a picture perfect site map, but you still
had to wait for the search engine spiders to find your website
important enough to fully index your entire website.
What
if I told you that there is a new technique that could literally
force the Yahoo spider to index your new pages,
and even your whole website, almost immediately? Folks, we're
talking in less than 2 hours!
This
is something that many people in the Internet Marketing and
Search Engine crowd have been talking about as of late, and
it's called the "blog and ping technique"
Blogging,
like I told you in an earlier
issue, has become an important tool for new businesses looking
to get their websites indexed quickly in search engines. You
can easily use your blog as a content management tool and benefit
from the added importance that search engines give to blogs.
But
now, you can flip that around and use your blog to drive search
engine spiders to your website at will!
| What
is the Blog and Ping technique? |
Here's
how the whole “blog and ping” routine works:
First,
let's say you've just added some new content to your website
(created a new web page) OR you've created an entirely
new website that hasn't been indexed by the search engines yet.
Now,
in order for the search engines to rank your new web page or
website, you need them to visit your new page. How do you do
this? Well, you could go out and get other websites to link
directly to this page. Depending on the Page Rank of your website,
you could wait a few days and hope that the search engines would
eventually crawl your site and end up at your new page... OR
you could use the blog and ping technique to get your new page
crawled in a few hours!
Ok,
in order to use the blog and ping technique, you need to create
a blog, as I taught you in an earlier
lesson . It's free and only takes a few minutes to do.
Search
engine spiders love blog content – it's fresh, regularly updated
and is the best online community tool around.
Since
the “blog and ping” technique involves the Yahoo search engine
spider, let's look at how you can alert the Yahoo spider
to come visit your blog.
The
easiest way to attract the Yahoo spider to your blog is to:
-
Create a My Yahoo account
-
Add
your blog as content on your personalized Yahoo page (don't
worry, I'll explain all this later on). In simple terms, this
means that there is a link within the My Yahoo website
(on your personalized page) which you will point to your blog.
Once
you've done this, Yahoo gives you the option to notify them
that you've added new content to your blog. This is called "pinging".
When you "ping" Yahoo, they will quickly visit your
blog and follow all links from your blog page. Thus indexing
whatever pages you have a link pointing to!
Now
that you can bring the Yahoo search engine spider to your blog
at will, it's time to take this technique a bit further and
use your blog as a launching pad for the Yahoo
spider to index your website or any pages that you want.
All
you need to do is to post new entries in your blogs containing
links to the pages that you want indexed into your blog. That
way, when the Yahoo spider reaches your blog and sees the new
post, it will automatically follow the links in that post, and
index any page that you want it to index!
-
Start
a blog
-
Create
a Yahoo account
-
Add
your blog's RSS feed into your My Yahoo
account
-
Make
a few posts in your blog
-
Ping
Yahoo
-
Repeat
Let's look
at each step, one by one.
Step 1:
Start a blog
This
is really easy to do, and I've covered this in a previous
lesson. The idea is to use a free blog service such as Blogger
(owned by Google) to quickly set up your new blog – it takes
under 10 minutes.
If
you already have your own blog (either through Blogger
or any other blogging service), then you're all set.
Either
way, on to step 2.
Step
2:
Create
a Yahoo account
You
most likely will have a Yahoo account. If you don't, then use
the following link:
Sign
up with Yahoo!

This
is the same ‘regulation' sign up form/procedure that you see
on most online services. Once you've signed up, you will have
a Yahoo username and password. Note that down somewhere (e.g.
in a text file on your PC) because you'll need that information
in the next step.
Step
3:
Configure
My Yahoo
Yahoo's
personalized portal is called My Yahoo and
is ridiculously easy to use. You access it by going to the My
Yahoo page, and then signing in to your Yahoo account from
the box on the left (see screenshot below). Use the username
and password you got from the previous step.

Signed
in? Great. Now let's go back to your blog. If you remember from
the start of this lesson, the idea is to use your blog's RSS
feed and add it to your My Yahoo page. My Yahoo works as an
advanced RSS reader by aggregating different content
feeds (of your choice) on the same page. If you want
to add more content to your My Yahoo page, you do it by either
selecting content from the Yahoo directory or by adding an RSS
feed directly through a URL.
Anyway,
how it works is not important if you didn't understand that.
The important thing to know is you
need to add your blog's RSS feed to your Yahoo
page. This is basically just a "special link" to let
Yahoo know where your blog is located, so they know where to
go. To do this, follow these steps:
-
Sign
in to your Blogger account.

You'll
notice my username is "bradstestblog"
-
Select
your blog from the Blogger Dashboard.

My
blog is called "Brad's Test Blog"
-
Go
to Settings (2nd tab from the left).

-
Select
Site Feed from the sub-menu tabs (6th tab from the left).

-
Find
the Site Feed URL on the page and either copy it or write
it down somewhere.

-
Go
back to your My Yahoo page. Login to your account and...

-
Select
‘Add Content' (It's located on the left middle portion
of the page).

-
Select
‘Add RSS by URL' – right next to the ‘Find Content' search
box.

-
Paste
the copied RSS URL into the box and press Add

-
Click
the “Add to My Yahoo” button on the next page.

Once
this is done, you can return to your My Yahoo page and if you
scroll down, you'll see that your blog's feed is now added to
the page.
Post
on your Blog
After
you've added your blog's feed to your Yahoo page, it's time
to get to the real meat of the action.
Remember,
this is supposed to get your website indexed by the Yahoo spider
as quickly as possible .
So
in your blog, when you are making your first post, include a
link to your website . If your website is already
indexed and you're looking to get new pages indexed
, you can include them in the post as well.
As
a rule of thumb, don't stuff 10 or 20 links into one post. That
could trigger spam filters and make life a
lot worse for your website. Instead, stick to 4 or 5 links per
post. Keep relevant anchor text (these are links, after all),
and use some descriptive content around your links (one more
reason to keep the number of links limited).
While
this strategy will guarantee quick indexing of your website
through Yahoo, it does not require that you ignore good
SEO practices or do something that will possibly mark
your website / blog out as spam.
Ping
Yahoo
Ok,
so now that you've made your post and put up links to your website,
all that's left to do is to “Ping Yahoo”, which
will basically tell Yahoo that there's a new blog post on your
blog, and that the Yahoo spider should come check it out.
Like
I told you in the beginning, once the spider comes to your blog,
it will see the new blog post, follow the links to your website
and start indexing your pages!
So
how do you ping Yahoo? You can use the following web address:
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=[your
blog address]
where
the text after “ping?u” is in fact your blog's web address.
So if your blog was at http://bradstestblog.blogspot.com
, the ping URL will then read:
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=[http://bradstestblog.blogspot.com]
Just
copy and paste the URL (complete with your
blog's web address at the end) into your browser and click Go
(or press Enter). This will automatically ping the My Yahoo
page containing your blog's RSS Feed, and this essentially tells
the Yahoo spider that it needs to visit the blog to update the
content in its index.
Repeat
That's
it! You can use this “blog and ping” tactic
to literally transform your website from an ignored mess of
thousands and thousands of pages into a hub that search engines
visit every single day.
In
closing...
It's
good to know how the basics of the "blog and ping"
technique work, but if you're lazy like you me you might want
to check out the software
product I use to do this, because it automates all of this
for you. You basically just plug a link to your blog into the
software. Click "go" and the software takes care of
"blogging and pinging" all of your website's pages
so there's no need to manually do all the steps above. And usually
within 1-2 days all of my webpages have been indexed by Yahoo.
It's a pretty slick little idea really, and quite frankly, I
wish I would have came up with the idea myself because I know
an aweful lot of people find it very useful.
The
tool I'm talking about is called "Blogging
Equalizer". It's a simple little program, but automates
things very well.
That
wraps up this lesson. Hope you've found it enlightening and
start to use this technique to get your new websites indexed
quickly. It works really well if done correctly.
Lastly,
I really want to provide you with some powerful resources and
lessons OR even software products. So, in order for me to do
so, I need you to tell me what you want to learn more about.
OR if there are certain things you would like to do, I can create
custom software programs for you! So, please email me at bradcallen@seoelite.com
and let me know EXACTLY what you want. I'll respond to your
email as soon as I can.
Talk
to you soon!

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
SEO Elite: SEO Software
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