Search Engine Optimization

SEO Ranking Factors in a Periodic Table

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Latest Changes – Week 21, May 2011

Some updates about the latest changes and updates done by Google.

• If you are looking for an area in Google Search, or even a zip code, Google is marking that area on Google Map and put it as part of your search result. In this example below, I was searching for “32503″, a zip code for Pensacola, FL area. 
• This second one is a happy news for Gmail users. Google is now adding more “protection” for people who is planning to attach an attachment, but oftentimes forgot to actually attach the file. Now, if you mention anything about “attachment” in your email body, Google will warn you if you hit the send button without actually attaching anything to your email.
• If you were using Google Webmaster Tool to manage your website, you will now find a new section for Google Instant Preview. The purpose for this is to match if the screenshot Google captured as your website reflects what normal visitors see when they visit your site. If not, it means Google is having some problem crawling and deciphering your website.

I’m sure Google released more updates than what I listed here. If you know more of Google’s interesting updates, please let us know by leaving your comment below.

Have You “Ping” Lately?

Ping…..? What’s that? That might be your first response when you read this post. Ping services are very useful to notify the whole world that your blog exist. I usually ping after I put a new post on my blog. WordPress actually has its own “pinger”, but it doesn’t hurt to boost that “ping” activity with some third-party service, right?

I recommended you to use http://autopinger.com. It is a one-stop ping service which allow you to ping to many different sites and content aggregators, such as Technorati, Syndic8, Google blogsearch, and many more. The advantage of using ping service like this is that you don’t have to ping all of those content aggregators one by one. You can even setup an account with them so that Autopinger will do the service automatically for you.

As you can see Autopinger.com has quite a few services to ping to. What impressed me was the fact that they also put the health of each service there. It is to let us know, from all the pings that were sent to them, how many of them that were actually successfully sent. If you subscribe with them, they can actually ping other websites for you automatically when they noticed new content is available from your site.

“Ping”-ing should actually increase your web traffic because it means that your website is getting more exposure in the blogosphere. The more exposure you get the more likely people will find you, either through RSS syndication or search engine result. Search engines, like Google, could also crawl your site sooner since it found many links from the content aggregators about your site. So, why don’t you do it? It’s easy to do and won’t take you long to do it.

Does “ping”-ing help your website traffic/exposure? Please share it in the comment section. For me, it lowers the gap time between the time when I posted something until Google actually crawls it, so it increases my site traffic from the fact that people can find my content faster.