Tricks and Tips 4 u: Useful and Informative

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!

Steps to daily indexing