The first thing you need to do is learn a little about link building yourself before you go shopping. You don’t need to be a link building expert, but you need to understand how the process works to be an informed buyer. You can learn what you need to know right here on this site. You may want to read these posts if you are not already familiar with these topics:

• How to get Links to Your Website
  
• Seven Keys to SEO Link Building Success
  
• Why One Way Backlinks?

You should now have a pretty good understanding of the kinds of linking and the benefits of one way links to your site. Let’s start by listing some of the things you should avoid in link building services.

FFA Sites and Link Farms – These don’t work, at least not long term and participating in them can actually harm your website rankings. FFA is short for “free for all” and are sites with thousands and thousands of links with no real content. Link farms are similar and the search engines may penalize your rankings if you have a lot of links from these types of sites.

Comment Spam – Posting relevant comments on blogs is a valid link building tactic, but posting junk comments just to get links is useless. Unfortunately, there are  services out there that use comment spam as their primary strategy.

Reciprocal Links – There is noting wrong with recipricol links, but if you get nothing but recipricol (or two way links) you are not getting a lot of milage out of your links. Two way links help a little but you really need one way links to get good search engine rankings. Some link building services concentrate only in getting two way links and if those are used they should be only part of your
link strategy.

Buying Links – Google hates sites that sell links and sites that buy them. If you buy links, especially high page rank links you risk the wrath og Google.  Even beyond the risk of being punished by Google buying links is by nature a very short term tactic. When you buy links you are paying for them every month and as the bills add up as some point you are going to want to stop paying for them. When you stop paying you abruptly lose the links.

We have covered what to avoid when looking for link building services. In the next article we will take a looks at the positive aspects and what you really want to get out of this kind of service.

The short answer to whether a blog ping helps with one way link building is yes. You should always include pinging as part of your link building campaign. The pinging process is quick, easy and has no negative impact. Since it does help with one way link building, doing a ping after every new post is a no-brainer.

The next question is how do you do a blog ping? The two usual ways to do a blog ping are to let your blog software do it automatically when you post or to use a blog ping service and enter your blog information then let them do the pinging for you.

Most blog software that you host on your own site will do the pings for you, but normally to a very small list of ping servers. For example, WordPress blogs are set to use Pingomatic by default. Pingomatic in turn will ping 15 – 20 servers.

What if you want to ping more sites? With WordPress and many other platforms you can enter your own list of sites to automatically ping. First you need a list of working sites to enter. Then you will want to be careful that the software does not timeout while trying to ping a long list of sites. I’ll give you another option in the next paragraph.

What if your blog is hosted on a service such as Blogger? You can go to Pingomatic and other similar sites and enter your blog information and have them ping for you. However, the list of sites they ping is fairly small. If you really want the maximum link effect and traffic from your blog ping you want to ping the biggest list you can.

I had been pondering that quandary for a while and was just not satisfied with the blog ping services that were available on the Net. So, I decided to create my own private blog ping service and list as many working ping servers as I could find.

I bought a blog ping script. The list of ping servers it came with was fairly large, but most of them didn’t work. I searched the Net and found about 400 ping servers from at least a dozen different lists. I tested them all and ended up with a list of 133 blog ping servers that actually worked. I was happy with myself that I’d put the work in and ended up with a very nice private blog ping service.

I had put so much work into getting this service just the way I wanted it I started thinking it was a shame that I was the only one that could use it. That’s when I decided to share the service with my newsletter subscribers. All you need to do is register for my newsletter and confirm your email address and you will get free access to my blog ping service. Go ahead and sign up now and you can ping one or even 100 blogs if you want.