When you’re starting a new blog, one of the first things you want to do is let the Interweb know about your great content. Besides submitting a Google Sitemap, which I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the easiest ways to get the word out and start getting your site crawled is to “ping” Update Services like blog directories, news sites, and search portals like Google and Yahoo to let them know about your new content.

WordPress will do this for you automatically whenever you write a new post, but by default WordPress only “pings” one Update Service to let it know about your new posts. This service, pingomatic.com, will alert a bunch of other sites, but why stop there?

There’s no harm in pinging as many sites as possible, so one of the first things I do when I start a new blog is put in a huge honkin’ list of Update Services to alert to my new content.Whenever I start a new blog, between using a Google Sitemap and pinging Update Services, I can usually start getting my articles indexed in Google search results (and ranked pretty well) within a couple of days of going live.

Here’s a text file with all of the Update Services I ping:

Update Services

To add these sites to your WordPress blog, go to Settings->Writing. In the Update Services box, just copy and paste everything out of the text file into that box, then click Save Changes. Voila! You’re pinging your updates all over the place now!

Note: I’m aware that some of the update services listed may now be defunct, but like I said earlier, it won’t hurt anything if you’re pinging non-existent services.

If you know of any other services that people should ping that I’m missing, please leave a comment and let us know!