What is Pinging?

Pinging as it relates to blogging is like raising your hand and saying "hey, I'm over here, please come and checkout the updates I've made to my blog".

The actual ping is a program that sends a XML formated text message verifing that your URL exists and that it is capable of accepting requests. After receiving this message the target site sends out a "spider" that "crawls" your blog. The spider is another program that reads and searches your site for new content.

You can manually send a ping to a site each time your blog changes but using a Ping Service such as Ping Goat or Ping-O-Matic allows you to ping multiple directories at once by simply entering your site's name and URL and clicking go. It's that easy.

Pinging really does help increase your traffic and should be done any time you add a new post to your blog.