One question that I get a lot of is once you have written an awesome article on your blog, how do you get the search engines to take notice of it?
Well, fortunately it is dead easy with WordPress, and so easy for beginners to implement, because WordPress has a inbuilt ping function that will automatically notify the various search engines if they are listed for notification.
I have compiled a list of (134) aggregators that I send notification too.
You can download it here.
Once you download it, then it is just a matter of updating the default list in WordPress with those in the list above.
Here are the steps needed to make the change.
Step 1) Go to Settings in the WordPress Dashboard, and click on Writing as shown in the picture below.
Step 2) Scroll down to the bottom of the page. Copy and paste the ping list from the download file provided above in the Update Services box as shown below.
Step 3) Press Save Changes and you’re done!
Now every time you publish a new post, WordPress will ping all of the services that are in the list. That will get the spiders coming to your blog looking for the new content.
Notifying the various services is really good for your SEO endeavors, however if you ping too often, then it can raise a red flag and some services may block you due to excessive pings.
This is not to say that you can’t post more than one new post a day, but anytime you make changes to a post and press the update button, WordPress will automatically send notification of a change to the ping list, and if there hasn’t been any significant changes to the post, then this could cause you a problem.
What I usually do when I create a new post, is to save it as a draft before I publish it, and then once it looks right, I press the publish button, which means I only ping once.
Or if I am updating a post, then I make the necessary changes and press the preview button to again make sure it looks right, and then I press the Update button, which means I only ping once.
However, I use one further precaution, and that is WordPress Ping Optimizer which will automatically stop excessive pings to the services in the list.