Ping Your Squidoo Lens

Now You Ping!

The first thing you do after publishing a new lens is to “Ping” your work.

What is a Ping?

A ping notifies services such as search engines and blog directories that your lens has been published or updated.  Pinging allows them to index your work faster, and getting it out to the larger reading audience.

By submitting your new URL to search engines, you are telling them that “hey, I have a new article, take a look and include my work in your search results.”   

If you don’t ping your work, it may take days or weeks to be included in Search Results. 

Pinging your lens won’t necessarily get you more traffic in itself, but in order to get traffic you need to be found by the search engines.  So the faster you get noticed, the quicker you’ll get visitors. 

What are Search Engines

Search engines are the sites that we go to when we want to search for products, topics and information.

Here is a list of the World’s top Search Engine sites:

Google Search 

Bing Search

Yahoo Search 

Rediff Search (India)  

Baidu Search (China) 

How to Ping Using a Free Ping Service

There are many good pinging services available to you free of charge.   They are all easy to use and there’s no sign up necessary.

Here’s a short list of sites of my personal favorites:

·     Feed Shark  

·       Ping.In

·       Ping O Matic

·       Pingler

What You’ll Need to Ping

You’ll need to have the actual URL of your lens to Ping it.  Go to your Squidoo dashboard and click on the “View” option of your lens.  This will bring up the URL for this article.

Copy it by Right-Clicking.

Go to one of the Ping Services. 

They’ll ask you for the URL.  Paste it by Right-Clicking again.

They’ll ask you for the Title of the article.  Fill this in.

Most will ask you to agree to their terms.  Check that box. 

Hit Ping.

*We’ve used a Squidoo example here but you will use a Ping  service for anything you publish on the Internet.

I’ve Pinged, Now What?

Your first lens is on its way to be indexed by the world’s search engines.  You are done for now.

But wait, you’ll be back!

An important step to keep your work climbing to the top of the search pages is to update your work every few weeks or so.

We’ll get into how updating is done on another post, but for now it’s important to note whenever you update your work, for whatever reason,  you should re-Ping your article as soon as you hit that Publish button.

Here's my most recent Ping!   

Click to Read: The Perfect Party Sandwich