SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimisation and more

What are search engine optimization tools, webmaster tools, Google page rank checker, SEO tools, and how can these internet tools help to bring more quality traffic to your Blog? There are many free online web tools that webmasters can use to find out more information about their sites. The tools can also alert the webmasters to possible problems search engines may have with the site's template codes and design. Here, we shall, for the benefit of our new bloggers, explain how these webmaster tools might help improve your website's PageRank.

Search Engine Optimization

We define Search Engine Optimization as – a method or process of improving and optimizing the ranking of a website in search engine results.

With millions of pages of search results for any given keyword, webmasters would want to have their website appear among the first couple of search result listings. The higher the position or ranking, the greater the likelihood that internet users will visit your site. This Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) concept is no different from a brick-and-mortar shop where location and visibility affect how many customers will pass by the shop and hopefully drop in for a visit. On the internet, your virtual site deserves a good location and visibility, and SEO consultants believe they know how to achieve that.

Blog Directory and Search Engine Listings

After having published a Blog or website, the first thing to do is to make sure that the information relating to the site is available on the internet. Web Directories, Blog Directories and Search Engines are the internet Yellow Pages. Although the major Search Engines will crawl your website even without any action on your part, it will be much faster if you could proactively provide them your site information. We had written articles on how and where to submit the blog information so as to have your site fully indexed and appear in many places on the internet.

Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com

We had explained how to submit Blogger sitemaps to Google and Yahoo!. When the sitemap industry standard was first announced in 2006, Microsoft's MSN was one of the three major search providers which supported the protocol. Submitting your Blog's sitemap to these search engines will enable them to index the pages and contents of the site. Needless to say, having all the pages indexed will essentially avail your contents to more internet users and improve your site's page rank.

Blogger Sitemap

If you own an external domain site, you can search the net for sitemap generators which help you create a sitemap file. Upload the file onto the root directory and call it sitemap.xml. The full URL of the sitemap will then be something like this:- “http://domainname.com/sitemap.xml”

However, we cannot upload files onto the root directory of Blogger blogs. Hence, when asked to insert a Blogger blog sitemap, it will have to be either:-

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

OR

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Replace YOURBLOGNAME with the name of your blog. For Blogger blogs, do not add "www." to YOURBLOGNAME. As an example, our blog's sitemap will be http://blog.blogspot.com/rss.xml

Submit Blog Sitemap to MSN

Unlike Google and Yahoo!, MSN does not have a set of procedures or an address where you can submit sitemaps to. In the latest post in their Microsoft Live Search Weblog, they had invited webmasters and developers to help build a New Webmaster Portal that would include sitemap creation, submission and ping tools, very much what Google and Yahoo! already had. Once MSN has that user interface, we shall update this article.

The MSN team had suggested that webmasters add this to their robots.txt file to have the MSN spiders crawl the sitemap file:-

User-agent: * Sitemap: http://domainname.com/sitemap.xml

Again, we do not have root access to the Blogger server and this will not avail to us.

The alternative solution in the meantime is to submit the Blog sitemap to Moreover.com. It seemed that there was a standing arrangement for Moreover to provide the submitted feeds to MSN for crawling and indexing.

Whether or not the arrangement still holds true, there is really no harm in submitting your sitemap to Moreover.

Copy and paste this line into your internet browser, replacing the portion in red with the name of your Blog:-

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

If you have submitted it correctly, you should see this message:-

Thank you for your ping. The moreover database will be updated with the new data from your url - http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml as soon as possible.

Submit Blog Sitemap to Ask.com

Ask.com, previously known as Ask Jeeves, is the next major internet search engine. The sites that it owns include Excite, Bloglines, MyWay and iWon. It is also a participant of the Sitemaps protocol program.

Submitting the sitemap to Ask is easy too. Copy and paste this line into your internet browser, replacing the portion in red with the name of your Blog:-

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

If you are successful, you should see this screen:-



Submit Sitemaps to other search engines

Progressively, there should be more search engines that will join this Sitemaps program. More likely than not, they will use the recommended ping submission format:-

http://search-engine-url/ping?sitemap=http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

If you are unable to find a submission link in that search engine site, try the above and keep your fingers crossed that it is the correct ping address.

Finally, submit your Blog to Blog Directories and Feed Directories to let more people know about your Blog. As well, submit your Blog to the various Search Engines for maximum exposure.

Submit Blogger Sitemap to Yahoo!

Publicize your site by having your Blogger.com or Blogspot.com blog site included in Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo! Search. I went to the official Yahoo! submission of URL page and clicked the link “Submit Your Site for Free”. You will be prompted to log in using your Yahoo! account. For those of you who do not have a Yahoo! account, simply sign up for one. It is Free.

After you have your Yahoo! account, and are logged in, you will see this screen.



Select “Submit Site Feed” and enter the URL of your Blog's site feed. You can use either:-

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

OR

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Remember to replace YOURBLOGNAME with that of your Blog's. For Blogger blogs, do not add "www." to YOURBLOGNAME. Once the Sitemaps are submitted, click the “Authentication” link shown at the top right hand corner of the page.



You will now have to authenticate your site ownership with Yahoo!, by either uploading a verification file to your site, or adding a META tag to your site. The authentication via a META tag was only introduced by Yahoo! recently, on Jan 30, 2007.

Note: Blogs created under Blogger.com or Blogspot.com cannot upload a verification file in the root directory. The first method is therefore NOT applicable to you.

The only way to authenticate your Blogger.com and Blogspot.com blogs with Yahoo! is to add a META tag. Copy the META tag that is generated for you, and paste it in your site's home page in the first section of the page, before the first section. What you do is to go to your Blogger dashboard. Under Template ->Edit HTML, somewhere near the top of the script, add the META Tag as follows:-



Remember to replace the META Tag with the code generated by Yahoo! Site Explorer. Once done, Save the Template. When you return to Yahoo! Site Explorer, click the button that says “Ready to Authenticate” as shown below.



You will see a message that says “Your site is pending authentication.” Check back later, and you will notice that your site is now indexed and crawled by Yahoo!

According to the Yahoo Site Explorer instructions:-

“If you have added the META tag, please keep the tag in your site's home page. We will revalidate your site ownership by checking this META tag regularly.”

It is alright to leave this meta tag as well as the Google sitemap meta tag in your template.

Submit Blogger Sitemap to Google Webmaster

Submitting your Blogger.com or Blogspot.com blog site to Google Webmaster will enable Google to find, index, and rank your site. For those who are new to this, you may go to the official Google Webmaster Tools site to create a new Webmaster profile.

Upon logging in using your Gmail account, key in your blog site URL, and click OK. You will then be asked to verify your site. This is to ascertain that you are indeed the owner of the site.

There are two ways to verify your site. You can either add a Meta Tag or Upload an HTML file. If you are using the Meta Tag method, Google will generate a Meta Tag code. Copy the META tag that is generated for you, and paste it in your site's home page in the first section of the page, before the first section. What you do is to go to your Blogger dashboard. Under Template ->Edit HTML, somewhere near the top of the script, add the Meta Tag as follows:-

Replace the META TAG with the code generated by Google Webmaster. Once done, Save the Template. When you return to Google Webmaster site, you can click the button that says “Verify”.

Note: The second method of uploading an HTML file is NOT applicable to Bloggers using Blogger.com or Blogspot.com because this requires you to upload a file to the root directory of your Blog, which is not possible. There is therefore only one method for you to verify your site, and that is by inserting the Meta Tag as explained above.

After you have had your site verified, click on the Sitemaps tab as shown below. By adding a Sitemap, you will be providing Google with more details and information about your Blog. With this, Google will crawl your site, report information on any errors in the Sitemaps tab, and index your Blog site at a faster rate.



Click the link that says “Add a Sitemap”. This will take you to another screen where you should choose the type “Add General Web Sitemap”. The Sitemap URL for any normal website is usually the index page that is stored in the highest-level directory of that site. In the case of Blogger.com or Blogspot.com, the only way to add a Sitemap is to use either of the following 2 Sitemaps:-

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

OR

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Remember to replace YOURBLOGNAME with that of your Blog's. For Blogger blogs, do not add "www." to YOURBLOGNAME. Once you have added your Sitemaps, you will receive a confirmation telling you that reports are being generated but “may take several hours to update”. Congratulations! You have successfully added your Sitemaps. When you login to your Google Webmaster days later, you should be able to see the indexed pages and statistics of Google webcrawl of your Blog.

Leave the meta tag in the template if you want to view the statistics of your site. If Google can't find the meta tag, it will show an error message in your webmaster toolbox and you may have to verify your site again.

Submit Blog to Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims at increasing the volume and improving the quality of traffic to a website from search engine results. Search engines work on different algorithms to analyze the contents and keywords, and present the search results. Google, for instance, assigns page ranks to the sites and sites that rank highly will appear early in the results. Of course, many other factors are considered by search engines, such as relevance, unique content, coding and quality of links. The major search engines know that revealing these factors will only encourage manipulation of the ranking system and have thus been secretive about how the ranking algorithms work.

While no SEO consultant can be absolutely certain about how each search engine views your site, the common agreement is that the more visible your site is on the internet, the higher your ranking will eventually be. Having your site linked to by many other sites and indexed by different search engines increase its exposure and visibility. We have given readers a list of Blog Directories and Feed Directories. In this article, we shall provide a list of search engines where you can submit your website or Blog URLs for Free and have your site or Blog indexed by the search engines.

Website Indexing

Unless you have created a private blog, it is a matter of time that your blog is indexed by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. One of the fastest ways to have your site indexed is to get another site that is already in the search engine listings to link to you. When the search engine crawlers visit that site, they will find your site and index it. We tried this out by linking to our new Blog and it appeared in Google search listings within three hours. Hence, try this method if you do not want to wait for search engines to approve your site submission.

Before we proceed to the list of search engine sites, there are a few points to note:-

1. To check if your site has been indexed by a search engine, enter the full URL into their search query. For some search engines like Microsoft Live Search, enter site: followed by the full URL. If you see your site appearing in the search results, it has been indexed and there is no need to resubmit the site.

2. If your Blog has been linked to by Blog Directories, websites or Blogs, you may see these other sites that mention your Blog appearing first in the search results. More likely than not, they have a higher page rank. Scroll through the remaining search result pages and you will probably find a listing that is solely about your Blog.

3. When submitting your site, you do not need to submit the URL of each individual webpage. Submit only the top-level webpage and for Blogger Blogs, it will be an address like this http://blogname.blogspot.com without the www. before the blogname.

4. You can submit your sitemap to Google and login to Google Webmaster site to know the status of the indexing and view traffic statistics. Also, submit your sitemap to Yahoo! to find out more about the index and links to your site. Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com too.


5. If you add your URL in Yahoo!, it will appear in their other search sites like AlltheWeb and AltaVista as well. Similarly, AOL Search uses the data by Google.

6. Some of the sites send advertisements and newsletters to you in exchange for free submission. If you don't want that, remember to opt out of it. Avoid having your regular email account filled with these mail by creating another free web-based email account just for website submissions.

7. Since search engines have different standards of content, design and technical specifications, submission of your site does not guarantee that it will be included in their database.

List of Search Engines

You may submit your site URL to these search engines for Free. If you lack the time, submit your site to the top few leading search engines.

• Google
• Yahoo! Search
• Microsoft Live Search
• Alexa Web Search
• Baidu (Chinese search engine)
• ExactSeek
• SearchSight
• Scrub the Web
• EntireWeb
• Gigablast
• Exalead
• SearchKing
• whatUseek
• AnooX
• Splat Search
• Walhello
• SearchIt
• email Mozdex
• Jayde
• Infotiger
• Abacho (European search engine)
• Submit-one
• TowerSearch
• HotLaunch
• Shoula
• The-search-site
• Websquash
• Unasked
• eVisum (educational resource)
• DinoSearch
• SearchRamp
• SearchtheWeb
• SearchWarp
• Mixcat
• BestYellow
• Beamed

Website Submission Services

There are many sites on the internet offering free website submission services to search engines. The list of search engines are by and large the same. For a fee, some of them offer to send your URL to more than a hundred search engines. Is it necessary to have your webpage listed in all the smaller search engines? We think that Google, Yahoo! and MSN have cornered such a large share of the market that it is sufficient just to have your website listed there. However, the decision is yours to make. For a start, you may want to use their free services and monitor the traffic.

• FastSubmit
• Submit Express
• AddMe
• Freesubmissionweb
• ineedhits
• Submitshop
• Searchengineoptimising
• AddPro
• Pageranklist
• Freewebsubmission
• Amfibi
• Burf
• Jerkasmarknad
• LocalSubmit
• SrSubmit

Submit Blog to Blog Directories (I)

How do you attract more readers and visitors to your Blog? To make your Blog more visible, the solution lies in submitting your Blog URL or RSS Feed to as many good Blog directories as possible. There are hundreds of websites touting themselves as blog search engines, blog directory hosts, feed aggregators, and traffic exchanges. A couple of the website creators are out to make a quick buck, selling their sites and member database on eBay the moment they attract sufficient traffic.

Over the past few weeks, I have submitted this Blog and RSS feed to many of these Blog directories for free. The first submissions were of course to Google and Yahoo; if you have not submitted your Blog URL to them, you may read the earlier articles on submitting sitemap to Google and submitting sitemap to Yahoo. At the same time, submit the Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com too.


Although my blog is only about 2 months' old at the time of this writing, if I were to enter my blog title “tips for new bloggers” into Google search, I am able to see it appearing at the top of the search results. Many of the other results are those of the blog directories in which this blog was listed. Listing in directories therefore helps in promoting your blog.

Before you proceed to submit your site to these directories, my personal advice is that you create a free web-based email account solely for this purpose. Should the directory hosts decide to sell their sites and database in future, your present email account would not be compromised. This is also to prevent flooding of your personal email with updates sent to you by the many directory administrators.

The aim of this article is to relate to you my experience in those free blog directories that I have tried submitting to. While I appreciate comments on these, please refrain from posting suggestions of new blog directory sites. A number of them may be fly-by-nights and I will not recommend them unless I have personally used them. Others may have specific requirements such as blogs having to be older than 6 months, or blogs covering specific news contents.

Different directories have different forms to fill when submitting your blog. Their instructions are usually easy to follow. However, you may want to note the following:-

1. Some directories require you to register before adding your Blog. While most of them allow you to submit more than one Blog, some may require you to use a different login name for each Blog. What I did in these situations was to create different login names but using the same email address.

2. If you are asked for the RSS Feed or your Feed URL, check that under your Settings -> Site Feed, the “Allow Blog Feed” shows either “Full” or “Short.” Do not choose “None.” Your Feed URL is yourblogURL/feeds/posts/default or yourblogURL/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss where yourblogURL is the URL of your Blog beginning with http:// Do not type in “www” for Blogger blogs. For example, our Atom Feed URL is name.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default You can test it by typing your feed address into a web browser and view. If you have an external Feed address like a Feedburner Feed address, you may submit that too. I shall go into the details of Feed and Feed directories in a separate article.

3. Where you are to create a picture, banner, or link button to represent your blog, you can use Google's Picasa or any image editing software to create a new picture, or resize a current one to the required dimensions. Normally, you are required to upload it onto a free image host or server and provide the URL of your banner or picture. You can read about using free hosts like Google Page Creator and Google Groups. We also have a rather comprehensive list of free Image Hosts and File Hosting Services in our article on Manage Blogger Image Storage Space. Check out those sites and choose one that is fast, reliable and enables hotlinking to the uploaded files.

4. The “Reciprocal Link URL” is the main page where you will be putting a link to their blog directory. More likely than not, this will be the URL of your Blog.

5. The “meta keywords” or “tags” are keywords that represent your blog's content. Similarly “meta description” is a short few sentences describing your blog. Basically, “meta” tags provide information about your Blog for search engines to identify and match.

As the directory list is long, the article will be split into several parts, and updated as and when I try out the sites. Some sites track the number of the visitors to your blog. You may see voting gateways, which basically give visitors a chance to vote for your blog if they wish to. If they do not want to vote, there is always an option for them to enter the site without voting. Have a look at the directory sites and submit your blog to those you like.

Traffic Exchange Sites

A number of traffic exchange sites have blog directories which can include links to your blog. You may read my earlier article for a more detailed discussion on traffic exchange programs.

Blog Directories

Technorati

They supposedly track 75.2 million blogs. Quite naturally, you would want your blog to be one of them. Register with them and submit your blog. Follow their instructions to claim your blog. They will provide you with statistics like the number of blogs that link to you. You can also invite other members to favorite your blog.

Wikablog

If you are familiar with Wikipedia, this is the equivalent for blogs. It faces the same problems as Wikipedia i.e., while it is easy to list your blog, it is equally easy for others to edit your listing. Nevertheless, for a new blogger, this is one of the fastest way to have your blog appear in a directory. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Fuel My Blog

This is an interesting directory. Unlike the usual text-based blog directories, this site goes by images that you create to represent your blog. When your visitors click a link on your site that says Fuel My Blog!, your image will move up the ranks and appear on the front page, making it more visible to directory viewers.

Blogtoplist

A blog directory listing that is sorted by the number of unique visitors to your blog. Your visitors can also cast a Vote to increase your ranking. The scores are reset every week to allow new bloggers like us a chance to be placed among the top.

Topblogsites

Here, you are ranked by unique hits based on the Votes you receive from your visitors. Many of the comments posted on the directory site are spam comments, and if you can disable comments, you might want to do that. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Mybloggingarea

Another directory that ranks you based on the Votes and the number of unique visitors to your site.

Topblogarea

A blog directory that tracks unique visitors. Unlike the earlier ones, visitors do not vote at this directory.

Blogflare

This is a simple, nice blog directory that tracks your unique visitors and pageviews. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Topblogging

Here, you are ranked based on unique visitors. Although there is a count for votes in, somehow the code provided by them did not track this vote count.

Blogroll

I joined this directory only about a week ago. A simple directory that monitors the Votes and unique hits.

Worldtopblogs

Ranking is by the Votes cast by the visitors to your blog.

Topbloglists

There is a voting gateway for your visitors but ranking is based on unique pageviews. For more visibility, you may want to submit your Blog to Feed Directories and ping your Blog every time your contents are updated. Also, submit your Blog to the various Search Engines for maximum exposure.

While you are looking at blog directories, you may also want to consider earning money while you are surfing the net. AGLOCO seems to have a nice scheme for you which you may want to take a look. You may also want to consider having AuctionAds to display an eBay auction widget which is compatible with AdSense and other ad systems. No harm trying it since it might give you an extra income.

Submit RSS Feeds and Pings

In this article, we list all the Feed Directories to which you can submit your feeds for Free. We shall also list the Ping services that you can use to ping whenever you update your Blog. This should help increase awareness of your new articles and attract more readers to your Blog. As the list is ever-growing, you might want to consider bookmarking this page as we shall update the list whenever we come across other useful services.

This article is a follow up on our earlier articles Submit Blog to Blog Directories, Submit Sitemap to Google, and Submit Sitemap to Yahoo. Get more visitors to your Blog by submitting your site to these Blog Directories and submit your Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com as well as these various Search Engines for maximum exposure.

Even if you are not familiar with feeds, you would have probably seen this icon in your web browsers. When you come across a page with contents that are viewable in web feed formats, you will be able to click the icon in your browsers to subscribe to the feed of that page. These feeds may either be a full text or summary of the content. The content can be read on a feed reader or aggregator which checks the sites regularly for new content. The terms RSS and Atom are feed formats.

To ensure that your Blog is able to syndicate the feed content of your Posts, login to your Dashboard and go to Settings -> Site Feed. Make sure that you have set “Allow Blog Feed” to Short or Full. Save the settings.

Next, key this URL into your browser, substituting YOUR-BLOG-URL with the URL of your blog beginning with http://

YOUR-BLOG-URL/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Do you see your Blog feed? Next, test with this URL

YOUR-BLOG-URL/feeds/posts/default

You should be able to see the contents of your Posts, either in summary form or full, depending on your Settings. These are your Blog Feed URLs. You can submit any of them to the Feed Directories that we list below. If you have syndicated your feed to other services like Feedburner, you can submit that Feed URL too.

To confirm whether your URL is correct, you may also enter it into this RSS Feed Validator.

Submit Blog Feed to Feed Directories

1. General

2RSS

4Guys from Rolla - For resource RSS feeds.

ASP Index - For resource RSS feeds.

Blo.gs

BlogDigger

Bloglines

Blogz

Bloogz

BulkFeeds [Update: Site inaccessible]

Chordata - Register to submit RSS feed in relevant category.

Daypop - For news sites.

DayTimeNews

DevASP

Feed24

FeedAge - Register to submit RSS feed.

FeedBase

FeedBomb - Select a category to submit RSS feed.

FeedBlitz - Register to submit RSS feed.

FeedBurner - Register to submit RSS feed.

FeedCat - Register to submit feed in relevant category.

Feed-Directory

FeedDirectory

FeedFury

Feedmap

Feedooyoo - Submit RSS feeds and keywords.

FeedPlex

Feeds2Read

Feeds4All

FeedFarm – For news related RSS feeds.

Findory

FindRSS [Update: site inaccessible]

FreeRSS

FreshPodcasts - For podcasts.

GeneCast - Register to submit your news feeds.

GoldenFeed [Update: error message when adding feed]

IceRocket

JordoMedia

Memigo [Update: site inaccessible]

MoreOver

NewzAlert.com - Register to submit RSS feed.

nFeeds

Octora

Odeo - Register to submit RSS feed.

Plazoo

Postami

ReadABlog [Update: error message when adding feed]

RedTram

RocketInfo

Rojo - Register to submit RSS feed.

RSSFeed - Register to submit RSS feed.

RSSFeeds

RSSKnip - Add RSS feed at the bottom. [Update: not accepting new feeds]

RSSMad - RSS feed submission at bottom right.

RSSMicro

RSSMotron

RSSNetwork [Update: error message when adding feed]

Rubhub [Update: site inaccessible]

Search4RSS

Sourceforge - For news feeds.

Syndic8

Technorati

TheFeedDirectory [Update: unable to add feed]

Videocast - For videocast or vodcast.

WeBlogALot

2. Specific

Auto Feeds - For automotive feeds only.

Nooked - For corporate feeds only.

Educational Feeds - For educational podcasts and RSS feeds.

Finance Investing Feeds - For finance or investment related RSS feeds.

Government Feeds - Only for feeds from local and federal government agencies.

Medical Feeds - For medical care or health related RSS feeds.

National Lib for Health - For medical and health RSS feeds.

Political Feeds - For political podcasts and RSS feeds.

Realty Feeds - For home related RSS feeds in the appropriate category.

Religious Podcasts - For podcasts relating to religion, sermon or spiritual beliefs.

Science Port - For scientific news feeds.

Security Protection Feeds - For security or protection related RSS feeds.

Sports Feeds - For sports related podcasts and RSS feeds.

3. Regional

1470 - Japanese RSS feeds.

31engine - Japanese RSS feeds.

Bakeinu - Japanese RSS feeds.

Bitacoras - Spanish blogs.

Bitacoles - Spanish RSS feeds.

Blogblogs - Brazilian blogs.

Blogbot - Danish RSS feeds.

Blogg - German RSS feeds.

BlogPeople - Japanese RSS feeds.

Blog-search - Japanese blogs.

Blogstyle - Japanese RSS feeds.

Feeds.com.br - Portuguese RSS feeds.

RSS Israel - Israeli RSS feeds.

RSS Nachrichten - German RSS feeds.

RSS Verzeichnis - German RSS feeds.

Technorati.jp - Japanese version of Technorati.

Veneblogs - Venezuela blogs.

Weblogues - French RSS feeds.

Submit Blog Pings


Now that your Blog appears in several Blog and Feed directories, you would want to keep these directories and search engines notified of your latest blog updates. By pinging some of the services, they will be able to crawl or visit your site to index the latest blog contents. You can ping them when you have created a new post or updated an old post. Fortunately for us, there are a number of useful services that make it easy for us to submit the pings to the tracking sites.

First essential step. Go to Settings -> Publishing and under “Send Pings”, select “Yes”. Whenever your blog is updated, Blogger will ping certain services that track blog changes.

Rather than pinging individual tracking sites, we have been using services which help us update different sites and search engines that include Verisign's Weblogs.com, Yahoo!'s blo.gs, Technorati, Newsgator, Feedburner, Moreover, Bulkfeeds and Syndic8. All we need to do is to enter the Blog URL and Blog Title and they will send the pings to all the sites we select.

Ping Services

Google Blog Search Ping Service - We thought we should mention this. For new bloggers who do not find their sites when they key them into the NavBar search box, ping this site.

Pingoat - A very comprehensive list of sites that you can choose to ping. The service is also very fast and it is done within seconds.

Ping-O-Matic - Less comprehensive list.

Blog Flux Ping Service - A list of sites as comprehensive as Pingoat's but the ping takes a much longer time and is not often successful.

Feeds Pings - A short list but has pretty relevant sites.

There are other services which volunteer to send the pings on your behalf. Some of them are services provided to members only. You may also ping individual sites like Technorati. However, we think that the above services would have sufficiently covered many of the popular tracking sites.

Blog Traffic Exchange and AdSense

After doing up nice websites with interesting contents, the webmasters' dilemma is usually one of attracting visitors to their sites. Having more visitors is gratifying; it is a reward that website owners deserve for putting time and effort into their sites.

Traffic exchange networks were designed to promote visitor traffic to websites or blogs. The idea is simple – members of the network surf each other's sites. Upon setting up an account with a traffic exchange program, you will be entitled to earn 'credits' by manually surfing other members' sites. Depending on the program, you may have anything between 0.5 to 1.0 credit for every site you visit. There is a timer at the top or bottom frame of the page to compel you to remain at the site for a period of time. This can range between 10 to 30 seconds. You are then required to click one of the images to correspond with the given image in order to proceed to the next random site. This is to prevent autosurfing hacks that may cheat the system.

With the 'credits' you earn, you can assign them to your blogs. For every visitor you get to your blog, 1 credit will be deducted until all your 'credits' are spent. In a nutshell, the more blogs you visit, the more visitors you get to your blogs.

Alas, no program is perfect. While the concept of traffic exchange sounds good, there are the negative aspects that you should consider as well. I'll summarize the good and bad points of traffic exchange.

Pros of traffic exchange

1. The programs are free, that is if you are not buying the 'credits' but earning them.

2. For some programs, you can specify the category of blogs you would like to view or the sort of visitors you would like to have. The traffic is therefore targeted.

3. While viewing other member blogs, you may come across a couple of interesting ones that you can re-visit or learn from.

4. Since the programs work well only if they have a wide network of members, the administrators often conduct mini contests and games to interest the members. You may find some fun in these communities.

Cons of traffic exchange

1. The biggest negative point is that such traffic exchanges run counter to many advertising programs, especially those that pay you based on impressions you get to your site. A notable one is Google AdSense. If your site's traffic is mainly through traffic exchanges, be prepared to receive reminders like this from the Google administrator:-

“It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of third-party programs paid or provided with other incentives to visit your site. Such programs may include, but are not limited to auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites.”

2. A number of the sites that register with traffic exchanges are new sites and are not worth the time reading. Many of the established ones that have a good following of readers do not need such traffic exchange programs to boost their traffic.

3. After surfing for a while, you would also find yourself looking at the same sites over and over again, simply because only a fraction of the members are active users. It may be boring in that sense.

4. While I make it a point to read some sites, I believe that many people don't. They may be doing their homework or watching television, and mindlessly clicking the image after every 30 seconds or so. You may be getting more visitors but these are not the people who appreciate your blog contents.

Blog Traffic Exchange sites

If you want to have a go at it, here are the ones I think you can consider.

Blogmad

This has a 1:1 ratio, which means that for every site you visit, someone will visit yours. The surf timer is 25 seconds and the site layout, ideas, and image icons (with the two big eyes) are pretty nice.

Blog Explosion

The surf ratio is 2:1, i.e. for every two blogs you visit, one person will visit yours. The saving grace is that they have about close to 50,000 blogs registered, although I have an inkling that only a small percentage of these are active. They do run contests like Battle of the Blogs which add to the fun of using their service.

Blog Soldiers

Another 2:1 ratio traffic exchange. Nothing fanciful about the site, and the administrators should do more work to build up their membership base.

Blog Advance

Their surf ratio of 1:1 sounds attractive, and like a few other programs, they throw in free bonus points when you log in or surf. What I didn't like was their lack of response. I raised a technical problem concerning adding a site and despite 2 messages, they have not replied. Such a contradiction to their statement that “at Blog Advance your voice doesn't fall on deaf ears.” Also, I received error messages on a few occasions despite having clicked the correct surfbar images and was unable to proceed to subsequent blogs. I guess there are unresolved bugs in the coding of their program. (Update: This service is no longer available and link is therefore removed.)

EasyHits4U

This is another 1:1 traffic exchange site that seems to have more commercial sites registered with them than blogs. It has a 30-second timer giving viewers a lot of time to view the blogs. The thing that stands out is that they pay you cash for active surfing ($0.50 for 1000 sites viewed)

TrafficG

This is not blog specific, and you will see a number of non-blog websites. The ratio of 1:1 is good, and the longer surf time of 30 seconds means that you might get more quality traffic, people who browse your blog contents.

Blogazoo

They have a 4:3 ratio, and credit incentives to read blogs and find the 'gazoos'. (Update: This service is temporarily not available and link is removed.)

Linkreferral

I happened to come across this site last week. Essentially, when you register your blog with them, other members can review your site, give a rating and post comments. The more sites you visit or review, the higher your blog rank will be, and the more likely that your blog will be seen by others. Unlike the other programs, you will expect visitors to go through what you write in order to review your blog.

Conclusion

If your blog is new, traffic exchange may do wonders in sending visitors to your site. Surfing other members' sites is also a good way to learn useful tips to improve on your blog. For a wider exposure, you would want to have your blog listed in Blog Directories, Feed Directories, and search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com. Also, submit your Blog to the various Search Engines. Nothing beats content though, and if you have good quality writing, you can be sure that your blog will be read.

I have tried out the traffic exchange sites for the purpose of this writing. With the credits, I have bought banner and text link ads since advertising a blog is not against Google's TOS. These ads appear at the traffic exchange sites when members are surfing, and make your site more visible.

Feel free to share your experience on the above sites, but please refrain from posting suggestions of new traffic exchange sites. There are hundreds of them and if you'd like, do a keyword search and try them out. New traffic exchange sites are created practically everyday. Run an eBay search and you will see a number of them being sold too.

Free SEO Tools

After you have submitted your website's data to all the search engines and directories, you should be able to find your site somewhere on the internet. If you do a keyword search on your website's topic, you may find many other listings in the search results ahead of yours. These are the sites which have better page ranks and are optimized for the search engines. You can optimize your blog or website too.

To attract business, many SEO sites have put up some of their SEO tools for free. Commercial sites which are serious in wanting to climb up the search ranking will pay the SEO consultants for more value-added services. If you are like us, blogging out of fun and passion, it might be better to use only the free services for a start.

Enter words like - free SEO tools - into the search box and you can see what some of these sites offer.

Enter your search termsSubmit search form

Suggested SEO Tools

Many of the SEO webmaster sites have similar free tools and services. You can try any of them, though the one that we like is iWebTool. In fact, they have a link exchange program which you may want to check out. Among the SEO Tools, the ones we find useful in all these sites are:-

a. Backlink Checker – A list of sites that have linked to your blog or website. PageRank is largely determined by the number and quality of links to your site. Monitor this and you can probably guess what your PageRank ought to be.

b. Broken Link Checker – A look at which of the links in your site are pointing to incorrect or non-existent URLs. Having too many outdated and broken links on your web page may irritate not only the readers but the search spiders. Do this housekeeping once in a while to remove the bad links.

c. Google PageRank Checker – The Google PageRank of your site. You can also download Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar to view the Google PageRanks of all the sites that you visit.

d. Google PageRank Prediction – A future Google PageRank prediction. If you are dying to know, these sites can give you a fair estimate of your future PageRank.

e. HTML Optimizer – A clean up of your HTML source code. Be careful when you apply the suggested changes though. Always good to backup the template before making any modification.

f. Index Checker – Number of pages of your website that are indexed by search engines. If pages are missing from the index, try submitting your sitemap again.

g. Keyword Density Checker – The keyword distribution in your webpage. This will by and large influence the sort of Ads that AdSense will place on your site.

h. Keyword Suggestor – Suggested popular keywords for your website. Bear in mind these keywords when writing or editing your posts.

i. Meta-tags Generator – Configuration of website's meta-tags. Tailor a suitable description and set of keywords to be inserted into the template.

j. Reciprocal Link Checker – A check to see if the partners in your blogrolls or link exchange are linking to you.

k. Spider Simulator – The page contents as seen by a search engine spider. Some may give you a breakdown of the commonly used keywords in your site.

l. Traffic Graphs – A comparison of your site's and other competitor sites' traffic history graphs in Alexa.

m. Website Speed Test – Speed of website page load. If you find the pageload time a little long, take some measures to have a Faster Web Page Load Time.

Basic Tools

Should you want to have a quick look at what some of the SEO tools are about, we have created a few basic search tools over here at our Tips for New Bloggers site.

Yahoo!

To know how Yahoo! sees your site, enter into the search box below your website's URL in full, beginning with http:// For Blogger blogs, you do not have to add a “www.” into the blog URL.

1. Yahoo! Indexed Pages

The results will show you the number and details of the web Pages that are indexed by Yahoo!

2. Yahoo! Backlinks

Enter your site's URL to see the Inlinks or backlinks of your site.

Google

The data in the various search engines are not the same. You can have a look at how your blog is performing in Google search by entering your site URL below.

1. Google Indexed Pages

Enter URL after the word site: to view the indexed pages in Google.

2. Google Backlinks

Enter URL after the word link: for details of the backlinks to your site.

Microsoft Live Search

Compared to Google and Yahoo!, MSN spiders may not index as many pages. Nevertheless, if you are curious to know, enter your blog URL into the search boxes below.

1. MSN Indexed Pages

Enter URL after the word site: to view the indexed pages in MSN.

2. MSN Backlinks

Enter URL after the word link: to view the backlinks.

Page Rank Checker

This search tool is provided by Prchecker. Enter a URL into the form to view the Google PageRank.

Alexa Rankings

Alexa monitors the web traffic of many top sites. You can compare and view the Alexa traffic graph of your site by entering your site URL into the search box below.