You´ve just completed creating an interesting new Blog – Page or Post.  Now you are wondering what to do.  Here is something that all experienced Bloggers do immediately after they click the – Publish – button.  They immediately notify Update Service websites that their Blog has fresh content available.

Although this may sound like a tedious chore, it’s really not so.

The WordPress core has a built in feature that called – Update Services. Many Bloggers refer to the WordPress Update Services as a – Blog ping – service.

It’s fully automatic.  Once its setup you have to do nothing other than craft the new Page or Post and WordPress will do the rest for you silently and surely.

Here is how you access the WordPress Update Services.

Login to your WordPress Blog as administrator you normally do.

In the wp-admin dashboard, left hand side vertical menu items go to: Settings —> Writing.

A screen as shown in diagram 1 is displayed in your Browser.

Diagram 1.

In the bottom one third of this page, locate the head Update Services. Beneath this heading is a text area in which one ( or more than one ) - Update Service – URL is displayed.

This is the URL ( or URLs ) that WordPress uses to inform the Blog sphere that there is fresh material created and available on your Blog.

If this section is empty, here are some websites where you can confidently pickup Update Service URLs from and copy / Paste these in this section of your WordPress Admin dashboard.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services

http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-ping-list

Pinging Update Services Manually

Just in case you wish to do this manually, here are a couple of free – Update Service – URLs that you can try out. These websites permit you to manually fire your Blog update information to multiple – Update Service websites.

http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/

http://pingomatic.com/

What are these Update Service tools?

Update Services are tools are used to let other people know you’ve updated your blog.

WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post.

In turn, – Update Services – process the ping they receive and update their proprietary indices with your Blog Page / Post update information.

Now site visitors browsing sites like Technorati or Sphere can find your most recent posts.

Why Be On These Websites?

Two words: Inbound Traffic.

Blogrolling scripts likeblogrolling.com and WordPress check such – Update Services -  websites to see if you’ve updated anything on your Blog site and then shows this information on everyone’s site.

This usually happens by you moving to the top of people’s blogrolling list or a recently updated indicator being placed against your link.

Services like Technorati spider your links to track who links to you and who you link to almost in real time. If you show up on someone’s Technorati link list (often called an “egorati search”) they’re likely to visit your site to see what you said, increasing your exposure.

WordPress really makes all of this easy for you by listing Ping-O-Matic’s server ( rpc.pingomatic.com ) by default. All you need to do is sit back and let it work for you.

If You Do Not Want – Update Services – pinged

If you do not want the update services to be pinged, remove all the update service URIs listed under head – Update Services – on the Settings —> Writing in your WordPress admin dashboard of your WordPress installation.

NOTE: Certain web hosts – particularly free ones – disable the PHP functions used to alert update services. If your web host prevents pings,  stop WordPress from attempting to ping – Update Services as described above and consider using the Feedburner Pingshot service.