Ping 'em is a utility for you to tell all the world about updates to your blog. Simply fill in the form, click the button and Ping 'em will pass the message on to all the big blogging services.
Case Study
So, we purchased 2 domain names personalisedcaricatures.co.uk and photostocaricatures.co.uk, set up Wordpress on them, configured them and wrote a few posts.
- personalisedcaricatures.co.uk - every time we made a post, we used Ping 'em.
- photostocaricatures.co.uk - we did nothing (except Wordpress's automatic ping to pingomatic).
A couple of days later, we did a search to see how many citations of each website Google had picked up (citations are mentions of the website that may or may not have a backlink - non-hyperlinked citations are good for search engine rankings although backlinks are preferable.
personalisedcaricatures.co.uk had 42 results.
photostocaricatures.co.uk had none.
In addition, personalisedcaricatures.co.uk was in 15th place in Google for its primary keyword 'personalised caricatures'.*
photostocaricatures.co.uk wasn't even in the top 100 in Google for its primary keyword 'photos to caricatures'.*
* The keywords used (personalised caricatures and photos to caricatures) were closely matched in terms of competition.
Perhaps ironically, personalisedcaricatures.co.uk was even ranking in Google's top 100 for the term 'photos to caricatures' outranking the other website with it's own keyword!
And the only difference between the two websites (except, of course, the content, which was top-notch for both) was that the successful website had used Ping 'em.
So, now you know how awesome Ping'em is :)