When you ping a page on your website or your RSS feed, you are telling the search engines that you have just updated the content on your website/blog and since search engines like new and fresh content, they are more likely to come over to your new post to check it out and hopefully index it into their page(s).

Not only does this mean that you will get more traffic to your website, but that you will get your pages indexed into the search engines quicker.

So how do you ping?

You just need to use a service that will do it for you or set it up into the settings area of your blog to do it automatically. Let’s review some of services that you can use, many of which are free.

There are popular free pinging services and some inexpensive choices. If you have a WordPress site and you want to ping the services each time you update your posts you can on of several plug-ins.

In Blogger go to Settings, Basic and make sure the “Let Search Engines find your blog” dropdown is set to Yes.

How often should you ping?

Each time you write a new post on your blog, update your website or you want to update Google’s cache date in their index.

If you have a static website and/or do not have an RSS feed, here is a free service that you can use, it is called HTML2RSS. Just sign up and create an RSS feed.