Setting up Your Ping List

What’s a keyword without a Ping list? Let’s think about it a minute. Okay, time’s up.

To set up your Ping List within WordPress, go to “Options”, and then click “Writing”. When you scroll to the bottom, you will see a box that will allow you to add your very own ping list. Within this list, you will want to add all of the social bookmark sites that accept and crawl blog posts. For a complete list, go to http://3spots.blogspot.com/2006/01/all-social-that-can-bookmark.html .

There is no sense in creating all of your tag URLs by hand. If you are using Wordpress, you can set your blog to do this automatically. You can do this using SimpleTags. SimpleTags is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily generate Technorati tags at the bottom of your blog entries.

To be truly successful in the social bookmarking community, you need to be an active participant, not just a bystander. So, be sure and bookmark other sites as well, wherever you use a tag and ping strategy.

Predictions for the Future

Some people believe that tag and ping will lose it’s effectiveness because of abuse that will inevitably happen in the system. But there are strong reasons for it to succeed, maybe getting stronger. While people that abuse the system will certainly start to see diminished returns, I believe that those people who use this system correctly will be able to benefit for many years to come.

Social bookmarking is most likely not a short-term trend. With major competitors like Yahoo joining in it is going to be around and possibly improved. And when used effectively, social bookmarking will bring you one-way backlinks, free traffic, increased exposure, and eventually sales from a long-term effort.

Just like your search engine optimization, you should take a natural approach to social bookmarking. This technique goes way beyond getting traffic. This is a long-term strategy that can help you to acquire quality inbound links and gain high search engine rankings when used appropriately.

Taking No Prisoners
Arthur Browning