Have you ever wondered how to get all the pages on your website noticed by the search engines? Perhaps you’ve been adding some great new content every week (wink…wink), but every time you do, it seems to take forever for the pages or posts to appear in the search engines?
Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing (the big 3 although there are hundreds) can be especially finicky when it comes to indexing pages on a website. Sometimes, you have to yell (sort of speak), throw up a red flag and summon them back to your website for them to grab your content and make it appear in the search engines for potential prospects to see.
How Do You Do This?
Luckily, there is a more effective way to do this than glaring at your computer screen, screaming a few choice words and hoping for the best outcome.
Pinging your website is the on-line equivalent of waving a flag and yelling, “Hey! Over here – check this out!” to search engines and directories whenever you add or make major updates to the content on your site. Using a Ping tool can speed up indexing because it essentially sends search portals and other services a message from your website telling them that there is new content and to come crawl it.
Although ping tools were originally designed for bloggers publishing daily, they can be used successfully on any website with fresh content.
A Free Tool To Help You Wave The Flag
To make pinging nice and easy for subscribers to my newsletter let me introduce you to a FREE Pinging Tool site called Pingoat (funny name, I know, but an effective tool).
It’s very simple to use. Just enter the name of your website, i.e. Peter’s Paint Store, the URL for your website homepage, or the specific page containing the new content you want to be found, i.e. http://www.PetersPaintStore.com/special-paint-on-sale, check “all” if not already checked, and click “Go PingGoat!”. PingGoat will alert a number of services that keep track of web logs and publish them.
Pinging your website is a good practice to get into as it can make a noticeable difference as to how quickly your new content and pages get indexed.
At the same time, you need to remember that it is only one tool in the toolbox required to get your website ranking well and receiving lots of traffic. While pinging is definitely worth doing, the results can vary and certainly aren’t guaranteed. You should still work hard building backlinks, producing fresh content, creating videos, press releases, etc.
Before you get started, here are 3 important things to know about Pinging:
- You only need to use this tool when you add fresh content to your site or make major updates. ‘Extra’ pings won’t benefit your site and could even cause your IP address to be blocked by some services.
- There is no limit on how many times you can ping your website every day – as long as you are adding new content every time that you ping.
- Adding new content to your site is a very good thing in general and you should aim to do it at least once a week.
Start using the free Ping Tool, Pingoat when you need to tell the world you have fresh content on your website.
As always, we’re here to help you with your on-line marketing efforts. Just give us a shout.