A recent post I made in week 2 of Pimp My Blog, made me realise I’ve never written about the benefits of correctly pinging directories and services when you write a new post.  Ensuring that you ping services like Technorati when you add a new post, will force them to crawl and index your site, increasing your changes of getting new traffic.

I think by default wordpress pings pingomatic.  If it doesn’t then add http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ to the box at the bottom of Options/Writing.  However, a better pinging service is pingoat, which includes several more search engines, directories and services.

Pingoat has numerous services that can be pinged.  You can ping each one manually, but it is possible to get Wordpress to ping them all automatically.  To do this:

1. enter your blog details in the boxes at the top of the page
2. Then select the categories you want to ping, which will automatically select all the sites within that category
3. Click ‘go pingoat’
4. Now here’s the clever bit.  Copy the url of the next page that loads and copy it into the same box in your Wordpress dashboard.  Now, whenever you write a new post Wordpress will automatically ping all of those sites on pingoat

If you’re a feedburner subscriber another way to increase the number of sites you ping is use the PingShot service which can be found under the Publicize tab.  This allows you to ping up to 11 services everytime feedburner sees that your feed has updated.