Pinging is a very important action that every blogger should do everyday. Refreshing the concept of ping provided in the last post, ping is a computer’s network tool used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network. When you ping a service, it means that you are sending a signal and it will answer with a “pong”, taking a look on your blog for new content and update it in the server.

As you can see, pinging is very important for us, the bloggers. With this tool you can refresh your content or feed across the web: search engines, technorati, social media networks and may be another service like web profiles, and you can use it to let other people know you’ve updated your blog. This gives you a big SEO advantage, it ensures that your content will be seen immediately by search engines and indexed quickly. This can help you to rank your posts for less-competitive keywords.

How To Ping ?

Pinging your blog is a really easy task and you can do it in different ways. When I started blogging the past year, I used the service provided by Ping-o-Matic!. It lets you ping your blog on many services like Technorati, Weblogs, FeedBurner, Blogrolling etc etc… You just need to put your blog URL and feed URL (optional), check the services which you want to ping and press the ping button. Then, Ping-o-Matic will send pings to all those services and your blog/feed content will be updated instantaneously on these sites!

That is a good way to do it, but it is boring because it’s manual. For our luck, there is a way to do it automatically with wordpress ( I’m don’t know about blogger or other platforms but probably is something similar ). WordPress automatically notifies to all those popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post. In turn, Update Services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. Now, people browsing sites like Technorati or Sphere can find your most recent posts!

WordPress makes easy the manual task of checking all your services at ping-o-matic, by listing Ping-O-Matic’s server (rpc.pingomatic.com) by default. All you need to do is sit back and let it work for you!

Where to add or remove pings on wordpress?

By following this steps you will be able to add or remove pings to your wordpress blog:

1. Log in to your WordPress weblog.
2. Select “Options” from the top menu.
3. 
4. Select “Writing” from the sub-menu.
5. The last option on the page is “Update Services.” You will see a text box with probably the ping-o-matic ping by default "http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping", but you can add more pings if you want.

Is recommendable to ping each service separately instead using Ping-o-Matic (http://rpc.pingomatic.com/) ping. For example, I recommend you to ping Technorati directly with every new post and update, instead waiting for ping-o-matic to ping our blog. The following is a list of english blog pinging services:

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

If you use one of thus services, place the related link into your Update Services text box to ping automatically your blog on it . If you are not using wordpress as blog platform, search in your panel of a pinging tool, I pretty sure it must be there, the only thing that you need to do is to add the url of your service and start to ping your blog across the web!.

Everybody in the blogsphere talk about backlinks, and may be you can’t understand what are they talking about, but really the meaning of backlink is very simple. A backlink is an incoming link to a website, is any link received by a web page, directory, website, blogs etc etc… from another website. The Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

How are they useful to my website?

 

The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of your blog or website. While more backlinks you have, more higher will be your popularity and ranking on search engines. A backlink represent like your signature, getting backlinks for everywhere means like if you were in all those sites, imagine what would you think if you visit 30 sites and you see my banner or link for example, you probably will think “this guy is everywhere, he’s popular!”

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the factors for determining that website’s search engine ranking. For example, Google’s PageRank algorithm uses backlinks to help determine a site’s rank. Therefore, websites often employ various techniques called search engine optimization to increase the number of backlinks pointing to their website.

Due to the abuse of using paid links to improve Google partially updated their Page Rank Tool to pin against paid links providers and the forward link of sites. This action resulted in a significant decrease in Page Rank of many websites worldwide. However although many believe that Google penalizes people for having unrelated backlinks to their blogs/websites, this has never been confirmed.

Some techniques to gain Backlinks

There are many paths to consider when building links to your site or blog such as link baiting or blogroll link swapping. There are many techniques to get backlinks but I will provide you only the most commons.

• Submitting your blog in web directories and social networks: This is a good way to get some backlinks, submitting your blog in social networks, also in directories like BlogCatalog or Blogarama. You should search for directory sites that are indexed deep (with too many backlinks), directories that are specific to your niche/category and directories where your category is not too crowded (almost impossible). There is a list of 20 essential blog directories to submit your blog.
• Commenting on Dofollow blogs: Dofollow blogs are blogs that give you a backlink just for commenting at them, doing this you will start to generate backlinks to your site as you have no idea, but don’t be a spammer!. If you don’t know what’s Dofollow, please check my guest post on JoeTech.
• Exchanging links with other blogger: this is very common, you can see in the most of blogs a blogroll section. Try to visit and comment frequently in a blog and after some weeks, you could contact the blogger and ask for a link exchange.
• Buying Text Links or Banners: plus text links, the banners also provide you a backlink. Before to buy, try to do an exchange…

My ideas disappeared ! if you find another way to generate backlinks please comment it in this post!!

Backlink Tools

• BackLinkWatch: this website is able to track every backlink to your site.
• BackLinkSpot: this website can provide you blogs and websites with dofollow attributes, letting you to find where you can drop your link to drink some of the juice of search engines backlinks.
• Technorati: with technorati you can track your backlinks!, they call them “reactions“. Following them, you will find the blogs which drop a backlink to you.

As you could notice, is very important for every website or blog to get backlinks. This way you will improve your rank on search engines and attract more traffic to your web, attracting the people attention .

Hello readers and bloggers, sometime did you think about why your feedburner’s subscribers counter change suddenly? or why a day it shows 100 and the next one shows 80? you probably have the wrong idea about what this counter really shows. I found this information by looking in the feedburner dashboard, there is a “i” of information beside the statistics in your Feed Stats Dashboard. It is something like this:

So what’s about this counter? what it really shows?

Basically this counter shows the number of subscribers you got during the last day. This mean that the number that you see there, is the number of subscribers you got yesterday, and it’s delayed by a day so really you can see tomorrow how was your blog today. Thats the reason why when you are starting your blog, you see how this number variate a lot, from 2 to 30 and vice versa, because this number doesn’t shows the number of total subscribers to your blog.

Instead, if you choose in your dashboard a date range like “last 7 days” or “all time” this number will be the average number of subscribers for all of the days selected. This number provides a general understanding of the size of your subscriber base over a time period.

How this number is calculated ?

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. The subscribers’ number is not computed for browsers or bots that access your feed.

Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers, aggregators and bots on the market to make additional inferences.

What’s the reach ?

This is another factor related to the counter. Reach is the total number of people who have taken action ( viewed or clicked ) on the content in your feed. So if someone click over a link your counter will increase by 1.

Subscribers is a measure of how many people are subscribed to your feed. At any given time, you can expect that a certain percentage of this subscriber base is actively engaging with your content and this “Reach” measurement provides this additional insight.

Additionally, there may be people viewing your content beyond your known subscriber base. For example, they may view your content on a feed search engine or news filter site.

Reach aggregates both of these groups, providing an accurate and useful measurement of your true audience.

Learning about…

I received this question by mail and I hope this post helps to understand the basics of the feed counter. A feedcounter is one of the widgets that you can’t miss in your blog, it gives an idea to your readers about how “popular” is your blog and also can give you a percentage about how many people visit your blog daily.

What is a canonical URL? I was reading something about that in some forums, so don’t worry if you don’t know, I also didn’t. Around Google, canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. Canonical essentially means “standard” or “authoritative”, so a canonical URL for search engine marketing purposes is the URL that you want the visitors to see. Depending of how your web site was programmed or how your tracking URLs were setup for marketing campaign, there may be more than one URL for a particular web page.

For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

• www.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.asp

Technically all those urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set. The problem of most search engine marketers run into deals with domains and sometimes if a domain is not setup properly, the domain URL (domain.com) and the www domain URL (www.domain.com) are considered as individual web pages, websites completely different but really both are the same and that’s a big error from the search engines side. Since both pages maybe indexed by Google, you could get hit for duplicate content and at the very least you would be splitting your link popularity.

An easiest way to protect your site is to redirect all forms of your domain to one “standard” URL, a canonical URL. To do this, you need to have some code lines in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

With that lines, I’m forcing to search engines to load http://mrjavo.com/ when someone type www. or http://www., you can try by typing some of those links on your browser and you will see how http://mrjavo.com/ will load, that’s because all those URL are technically “the same”.

Every blogger has him own way to manage him blog: its appearance, posts and singularity. But sometimes, the bloggers forget something very important, that they are writing to other people, and what they do in their blog will create an image of them in the visitors. What that means? that simply means that everything you do in your blog will reflect your personality, and if you do wrong things your readers possibly will get a wrong image about you and they will start to leave and go away !. And what are those things that ruin your blog and make your readers go away from it ? I create a little list of things which will help you to be alarm when you’re blogging.

6 Things which ruins your blog and make your readers leave forever!

1. Repeating your posts: this is very common with promoting posts. I had seen blogs promoting the same service 2 or 3 different times, just because they want to earn money. That only has a name, desperation!! come on who wants to read over and over again the same information?. If you want to make a *reminder* of your promotion, you can make another post promoting a similar service and link them from there, but posting the same information you won’t get anything, just make your readers leave your blog.
2. Having so many banners: exist people who think on creating a blog just for put on it N banners and “get more money”, but they are doing nothing. Putting a lot of banners on your blog will make it hard to read, also slowest to load and that it’s just annoying for the readers. If you have too many sponsors you want to promote, you need to consider the best ones and discard some of them, making your blog more clean and fast for navigation.
3. Colors/Look/Appearance: ok may be I’m not the best to critique this, everybody has different tastes. But how is possible to have fun reading a blog with an orange background?? I saw that these days and the first I did was close the window, I lose the interest immediately. So try to care your blog’s look, it’s very important, remember that a good look can attract more readers to your blog!.
4. Copying Posts: If you have not a topic to post about it, just don’t post anything! is better to wait some days before publishing something which is not yours. Copying posts ruin your reputation and you shouldn’t do it over any circumstances.
5. Blogging Unattended: when you think on creating a blog, you need to know that you should maintain it periodically, not everyday but just with some frequency. If you forget about your blog for a month, all your readers will leave it because of you! you have to give them new content and information which they could read and enjoy.
6. SPAMMING: definitively the worst one! you never should spam with emails, comments or posting for a wreck purpose. Spamming won’t help you to nothing, instead it will help you to get listed on the blacklist of spammers. If you want to promote a service just post about it, but don’t start to send mails for who don’t want them.

There are too many bloggers who made some of that list and they don’t get slapped by their readers, that’s because that blogger has some many time blogging and doing a good job on the website and the readers simply will understand it like a mistake and anything will happen. But if you are a new blogger and you are getting new readers constantly, doing whatever you need to attract more and more visitors you can fall on the sins listed and you could lose some of you readers. By avoiding those six actions listed above you will conserve your readers and attract more and more visitors daily, just don’t desperate to expand your community and chill out.

Hey you blogger! there is a simple way to earn money with your blog, being one of most simple and easy, selling text links!. How it works? well it’s simple, you can earn money by placing a text link in your blog: in the sidebar, in the footer, in the header or anywhere you want. In the Internet marketing network exist too many sites providing this kind of service, allowing you to buy/sell links in a big network with advertisers of every category you can imagine, this mean that you probably will get an advertiser no matter what’s you blog niche, you won’t have problem with that. The next is a little list with some programs to buy and sell text links over the web:

• Text Link Ads: This is one of most popular network on internet to buy and sell text links. Text Link Ads is the premier targeted traffic and link popularity ad firm. They specialize in placing static html links on high quality, high traffic web properties. They currently work with a wide range of clients from Fortune 500 firms to individual website owners. This is a good option to start selling links. Recommended!
• AdToll: This is a great program because plus text links, they work with banners, skyscrapers, buttons and video ads!. They have just one requirement to accept you on their network, all they ask is that your site contains enough content to make the site useful. Sites offering or promoting “get paid to read” or “get paid to click” programs, pyramid schemes or similar programs are also not accepted. Recommended!
• LinkWorth: This is another great program. They provides you the opportunity to sell text link ads, sponsored blog reviews, pay per click ads, single url rotating ads and another interesting services. It’s a great program, very recommended!
• ReverseLinks: is a network which you can buy and sell text links directly in your site. Your text links price will be set depending your PageRank.
• TextLinksBrokers: I never tried it but it seems a good company to work with. They provides a reseller program in addition of the customer program, you should check it out.
• BackLinks: this is a simple site which allow you to sell and buy text links, setting your link price by pagerank. The price range is from $0.5 up to $75 for link!

All the programs listed bellow are good, indeed the bests I found in the web. I have used some of them ( the recommended ones ) and you should take a look on it, really worth the test.

I personally don’t use this services, at least not for now because I’m actually using my private ads and this mean that I keep 100% of the earned money. In this programs, you earn like 70~80 percent of the sell, the other percentage is for the service. This have advantages and disadvantages: your site will be listed on a big list full of advertisers, so you’ll have more probability that someone buy your ad. The disadvantage is, as I said some lines above that you don’t get the 100% of the sell.