How fast can you get new website content into the hands of your customers, readers, investors or community using organic search results? Weeks? Days? Seconds? Let’s walk through the old method …and then I’ll show you how to supercharge it!

For the “Slow and Steady, Play Nice” Group…

If you’re like most website owners, you can usually get your web guy or gal to add your hot and timely article to your website within a day or two. That’s quick, but unless you know what you’re doing Google and the rest of the search engines can take up to 90 days to find it and add it (index it) to their database. That’s right, it can take up to three months for the search engines to discover your (now, not so hot and timely) article before they make it available to people searching for it.

Unfortunately, the only people who will see your article are the people who go directly to your website. The other 98% of the people who want to read your article, won’t be able to find it because the search engines won’t know it exists for another 13 weeks. That’s why it’s so important to inform the search engines about your article the instant it is written.

When you understand that the search engines are not the Internet, this will make a lot more sense. There is far more information on the Internet than Google, Yahoo!, MSN and the other search engines know about. Why? Because most of the people who add content to their website don’t know how to inform the search engines of its existence.

Please don’t feel bad. Most website owners and many of the best website designers on Maui don’t have a clue as to how search engines work. Getting your article indexed quickly is not their fault. That’s not what you hired them to do.

So, that’s the old method. And it’s the same way that over 90% of Maui website owners are still using to get their content into the hands (spiders) of the search engines. I call this the post and pray method of search engine marketing.

On the other hand, there are those of us among you here on Maui (maybe even your competitors) who are using a blogging platform like WordPress or Blogger to add new content to the Internet in a matter of seconds, and we’re doing it without the help of a technician. More importantly, we’re getting our hot and timely content into the hands of the search engines just as quickly. This is a secret that your competitors don’t want you to know about.

But I Want My “New Content” to Arrive Fresh too!

OK, good. If you’re like me you want… need… instant gratification! I’m far too impatient to wait days, much less months for my content to start driving potential customers to my website! I want to get my article, press release, new product information into Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) within a matter of minutes, or less!, and here’s how I’m going to do it.

What is this PingShot thing?

In the blogging and website world, ‘pinging‘ is the process of your site to automatically alert content hungry rapid redistribution sites like Icerocket, Newsgator, Ping-o-matic and Syndic8 that you’ve just published new content.

If you use a WordPress blog for example, you have the ability to ping as many sites as you like each and every time you create new content. In the blogging world you ‘post’ new content to your blog). But this can be a time consuming manual task, especially for those of us looking for instant gratification.

Fortunately for those of us with ADD/ADHD there is free tool from Feedburner known as PingShot that will do this for us automatically. Here’s how it works.

Start by going to www.Feedburner.com

1.) Sign up a Feedburner free account (It takes about 20 seconds.)
2.) Follow the directions and burn what’s called an RSS feed for your site. (You do this from Feedburner’s home page)
3.) Go to “Your Feeds” and select ‘your feed.’
4.) Click on the “Publicize” tab. (along the top navigation)
5.) Click “PingShot.” (On the left hand navigation)
6.) Enable everything you can and add the 5 additional services)
7.) Click Enable.

Now, every time you or your web guy post new content to your website or blog, Feedburner will automatically notify nearly 30 sites about the new content on your site. By creating a Feedburner feed for your site, you’re taking the initiative to inform all of these other sites about your content instead of waiting for them to find it.

The thing I like most about Feedburner is that it is a set-it and forget-it service. And the really cool thing about this free service is that all of the search engines including Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask and AOL will index your content faster and faster each time you write a new article. Don’t be surprised to see your article in the search engine results page faster than you can say Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

If you want help connecting your blog or website feed to Feedburner ask your web guy or gal to do it for you. They may not understand the marketing value of doing this, but they will certainly be able to assist you with the technology.