Web Site Promotion

We all know how important it is to tell everyone your blog or website has updated information. One popular way is to ping, ping, ping. Your feed may eventually be discovered but the time lag may be several hours or days…or never. One thing you do not want to do is ping a ping server several times for the same update - this will be construed as ping spam and your site may be blacklisted.

Once a feed is updated either by adding a post on a blog or updating your feed file on your website (if you have one) the rest of the world needs to know about the new information. This is done by letting ping servers know an update has occurred. Once a ping server is updated the feed aggregators (reader) subscribed to it are notified and the update appears in your feed reader. Most blog software has a way of pinging servers after a post is made though you may not have control over which servers are pinged.

It started out innocently: I wanted to find out which servers were being pinged and IF they were being pinged. I am deciding whether to use FeedBurner to do my pinging, rely on pingomatic which is the default for WordPress blog post, find a new multiple ping service, or let my blog (WordPress based, my own host) do all the pinging.

After looking on the pingomatic web site I could not reliably figure out exactly who they ping, when they ping, and whether the ping was successful…and no way to get in contact with anyone to find out. I assume it is all of their common services and none of the specialized ones but I do not like ambiguity.

more later…

Doug

The title tag is one of the more important items in not only search engine attraction but user attraction, too. Typically the title’s contents are displayed on a SERP (search engine result page). Also the title is shown in the browser title bar and when a bookmark is created.

Unfortunately, blog software treats the title tag in different ways. Some do not even create a title tag while some put in various entries.

In WordPress the default title is the blog name followed by page information. The problem with this is that the closer to the front the more important the information according to search engines. Plugins exist, such as optimal title, to make the blog title and individual post titles better suited for search engines.

Check your blog and individual posts (look at page source) to make sure the title tag has what you think it has. You may be surprised.

Doug