Day 7: Link Structure, Pings, MyBlogLog

24 Jun, 2007 Education, Marketing Brian Armstrong

This is day 7 of my 30 day marketing challenge. Today’s ideas come mostly from John Reese’s article here.

1. I adjusted my link structure to be a simpler format: “/postTitle/” instead of what it was “/year/month/day/postTitle/”. Supposedly this will help search engines pull keywords out of the links by making them shorter and the directory structure smaller. I used this plugin to make sure I don’t break any links in the transition.

2. I added a big list of “update services”. Updated services are websites that get notified (pinged) each time you make a post on the blog. Here are the ones I added:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.bitacoras.com/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

3. I submitted the site to MyBlogLog and tagged it with the right keywords. This (in theory) allows a community to develop around your blog where people will say they like your blog and will share it with others. I don’t know much about it but it was recommended. It comes with a little snippet of code you can use on your website that shows who has viewed the site recently. I couldn’t format it correctly on my site so I removed it. Hopefully it can still be used without the snippet of code installed (this is what I assume, but can’t say for sure).

I wanted to also try changing the hyphens in my link structure to underscores too, but was unable to find a way to do this.

This post is part of a series on Website Marketing

6 Comments so far »

Rob said,

Wrote on June 28, 2007 @ 10:44 pm

You don’t want to switch to underscores instead of hyphens. See this article:

http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/seo-news/hyphen-or-underscore.php

Basically, Google doesn’t see underscores as word separators, and will combine the words.

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on June 29, 2007 @ 1:36 am

Interesting, thank Rob!

[Reply]
Day 14: MindPetals Article, Slow Server, Google vs. Yahoo indexing said,

Wrote on July 2, 2007 @ 1:41 pm

[...] help Google index the entire site). I’m hoping this is just a temporary side effect of my changing the link structure that will be resolved soon! This post is part of a series on Website MarketingTable of [...]
Freddie said,

Wrote on February 12, 2008 @ 12:24 am

Brian,

Tomorrow is Day 7 for me in this challenge and I have a question. How did you ad the Pings to all of those websites? Do I need to visit each one individually or is there a one site does it all?

Once difference is I am using Blogger.com for my blog. I do have in inserted into my website like yours, thanks for that. You can see mine here, http://www.investwithpassion.com/blog In the near future, I plan on making this the homepage. Right now, I am just playing with the template and getting it right. I just picked up DreamWeaver to take advantage of CSS. I had been using FrontPage, but it is time to upgrade.

Thanks again for the 30 Day Challenge and I will continue to post, ask you questions, and comment on my experiences as well.

I will say this, all of this more comprehensive and a lot more work than I planned. I still have mountains of work to do with the LinkMachine from early in the 30 Day Challenge.

Take care,

Freddie

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on February 13, 2008 @ 7:51 pm

Hi Freddie,

The blog software I’m using is called Wordpress and there was an option to fill in all the places to ping. Try this for blogger:
http://technorati.com/developers/ping/blogger.html

Keep going its hard work but the real payoff comes down the line. Good luck!
Brian

[Reply]