Search engines spider the web on a continuous basis. They will visit your site, when they expect changes. They register the changes and mark down when the last time was you updated your blog. This helps them understand how frequently they have to crawl your site to get all the information and stay accurate in their representation of the world wide web.
This brings up the question how they will find you the first time. You used to have to submit your site, by hand, to all the major search engines and wait for them to come index your site.
Luckily, these days there are several free quick ways to get your site indexed and your posts noticed by the search engines. The first one is obvious. Get a backlink on a site that does get crawled frequently. In other words find a high PR, high traffic site. Of course, I am talking about social bookmarking sites. Bookmark your site with several social bookmarking sites for fast exposure to the search engines. Just make sure not to bookmark your own website only. That would be considered spamming.
I highly recommend this option, although I do want to point out that you have to make sure to use “dofollow” sites, otherwise the search engines will ignore your links. I keep an updated list of do-follow social bookmarking sites on a seperate page.
Another easy and free way to notify the world that you have a blog and that you updated it recently is to ping your blog. WordPress does this automatically for you as long as you leave the option active.
You may think that, as a result, you don’t have to worry about all this for your WordPress blog. This is true, you could leave it all alone. However, with a small adjustment your efforts of writing new posts will be rewarded much faster.
Here is the reason I am telling you all this. WordPress offers you one ping service, Ping-o-matic. Pingomatic.com covers several sites, but it is not reaching all the sites you would like it to. That is why you need to add a list of ping services. You can find the list and instructions where to add them to your blog on the page called “ping list”.
Once you get enough traffic to your site and the search engines come crawling regularly, this becomes less important (from an indexing perspective). Another good reason to post to your site regularly.
