Using Your Social Bookmarks to the Fullest: Ping!

By now you know that how much social bookmarking can do for you. It is a phenomenon that has the potential to drive huge amounts of traffic to your website.

The World Wide Web is dynamic, as we saw when discussing the world ‘live’ web. It focuses on websites, blogs articles and videos that are constantly being updated.

Especially when considering your blog, it is vitally important to stay on top of the traffic game by making sure that search engines have the latest knowledge of it instead of relying on the search engines to do all the work to find you, since search engines have several million blogs to sift through every day.

So, you should do whatever you can to ‘help’ the search engine search results by informing them every time you update your blog. You do this by sending a ‘ping’ to the major directories every time you add a new posting to your blog.

The technology behind the ping function is, however, not new or solely related to blogging. It is, in fact, a simple program that has been used for many years as a way of making sure that a certain IP address actually exists and is able to accept requests from remote machines.

‘Ping’ is sometimes also used as a verb – to ‘ping’ is the act of using the ping program or command. Sending a ping is almost like running a sound check on the computer that you are trying to test. Using the ping program or command is also commonly used to figure out how much time it takes to get a return response from the host. A ping can also help you learn the numeric form of the IP address of the host computer, simply from the domain name.

That was the original ‘technical’ meaning and usage of a ping.

Let’s make sense of it for our own use. In simple terms ‘ping’ implies ‘getting attention for’ or checking the presence of another party that may be online. A ping works by sending information or a ‘pack of data’ to a particular address and then waiting for the correct anticipated response.

In fact, the word ‘ping’ has interesting roots. The technical computer term for the program is Packet Internet or Inter-Network Groper – hence the acronym PING. Ping is also the term used for the sound of a returning sonar pulse used by submariners. The ping function is also relatively commonly used for validating the existence of an emailing list. This sort of ping involves sending a message to the mail server service of the members of a specific email list requesting an acknowledgement code or ACK. This ensures that all the emails listed are both live and valid.

This is done before sending a genuine real life e-mail message in order to confirm that all of the addresses on the list are reachable and not dummy addresses. So, this form of ping is not sent to you personally, as this kind of e-mail validation takes place strictly in the background without your knowledge. It is a behind the scenes communication between the computer that sends the ping and your email host’s mail server computer.

However, if you have your own mailing list, it enables you to make sure that you are not sending newsletters, updates, promotions etc to email addresses that either did not exist in the first place, or have since become dead or dormant.

Pings have become increasingly important to bloggers as a part of their efforts to keep search engines informed about their latest updates. Bloggers inform the various search engine and aggregation services such as social bookmarking websites by sending a ping to these service providers. It is simple notification that basically says – I’ve just updated m, blog - care to check it out?

Once the service receives an appropriate ping signal from a website, it is taken as a confirmation that something has been updated on that blog or website. The service then visits the blog or website in question and immediately indexes any new content it discovers. In this way, it could be suggested that a ping is like an ‘invitation to visit’ more than anything else!

Having the ability to actively ‘ping’ an update message to all of the major directories means that search engines no longer need to regularly visit blogs to discover new changes. Pings allow bloggers to make the first move by informing search engines of changes when they happen. This allows search engines to be more efficient by reporting and showing updated links as soon as they happen. It also means that blogs are indexed on time.

For you, it means that new content on your website is presented to the public in a more timely fashion whether you rely on search engines or social bookmarking websites for your traffic. When you send a ping to the social bookmarking website where you are registered, it knows immediately that there is some interesting new material out there and puts it forth for their users to view. As we saw in the social bookmarking site reviews earlier, many of them highlight the latest posts made, so the more you can post regular updates to your site, the more it is going to pay you to ping your social bookmarking website. This is because an increasing number of more ‘new’ posts also means an ever-increasing number of links back to your website.

Most of the blog authoring tools automatically ping a server every time you update an existing post or create a new one. The blog authoring tool sends a signal to one or more ping servers. The ping server receives these signals from many thousands or millions of these events, with the number obviously depending on the number of updates made to blogs. The ping server then creates a list of the blogs that have new, updated material.

One thing that you should be aware of is that many of the big players in the blog search engine business use their own proprietary ping servers and software. Whilst this works excellently for the blog search engine itself, it does not necessarily provide you with the maximum benefit. This is because it effectively creates a conflict of interest between the blogger who wants his/her post to remain visible for as long as possible to generate maximum exposure and publicity, and the web service owner who wants his/her search engine to be updated with the latest blog posts as quickly as possible.

As a result of this conflict of interest, bloggers have had to find independent ways of pinging their blog to the search engines and blog directories, and this has led to the development of ping servers that can ping several proprietary ping servers at the same time. This ensures that the blog gets the most publicity possible and it is updated on several search engines rather than just on any individual one.

Here are a few of the many independent ping servers that you can utilize the services of:

Pingomatic: Find it at www.pingomatic.com. You will see that it is an extremely simple website. You just have to enter the URL for your social bookmarking website along with its name. Below that is a list of the web services that ping-o-matic can ping for you, so all you need to do is choose which services you want to inform of your updates. You could also just enter the URL for your website or blog directly. Ping-o-matic updates all of the major web services such as Weblogs, FeedBurner, My Yahoo!, Technorati, NewsGator etc.

 Kping: Find it at www.kping.com.  Kping is also a free ping service that lets you ping up to 57 different services at the same time, and once again includes all the most important is services and directories such as Weblogs, Technorati, NewsGator, TopicExchange, StrategicBoard and many more.

 Using Your Social Bookmarks to the Fullest Ping