Using Your Social Bookmarks to the Fullest

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 my 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.

Gary David is a full-time internet marketer and the founder of Unlimited Marketing, Inc. He's also the owner of http://www.privatelabelunlimited.com membership site. Check out the website for more details on making money online using private label rights products.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gary_David