The beauty of WordPress is that it automatically tells Google (and a bunch of other sites) to look at your post- every time you post. But, there are a lot of other ping services as you can see in this post:

SEOposition.com Blog » List of Pinging Services for your Blog

Ping services simply let other sites know when your site has updated. By allowing XML-RPC or (pings) as they are more commonly called, sites will know almost instantaneously when you update new blog posts or content. In turn, they will update their indices accordingly.These notifications, or pings, are valuable in many ways although I think you can also “over submit” if you’re not careful. It really depends if the site’s using the ping have URLs that are indexed in search engines. Most are dynamic search pages only, so they are fine.

Here’s a list of pinging services you can use with your blog…
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping/
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2 euro.weblogs.com
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.catapings.com/ping.php
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

Today I was calling make-up artists for a photo shoot. And, of course, I didn’t start with a google search- I called a photographer I knew well and asked her who I should call. She gave me three names, and one of the artists told be about the forth. Good thing I called my friend, because none of the three she told me about had a website.

Each time, I asked, do you have a site that I can look at your work-  each of them gave me an excuse. None of them would would think of working without a phone, but all of them seem to think a site won’t help them. Only one of the three site-less ones had a digital file ready to e-mail, a nice little quicktime movie that showed some of his work. The other two- nothing.

Make-up artists are the ultimate cottage industry. You don’t hire a “Make-up artist company (at least not in the Midwest), they are all self-employed, sole proprietors, in a very visual business. Hence, a website would come in handy. Especially in the Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus Ohio market, where there is a small community of make-up artists- and quite a few photographers.
While the cost of producing a good looking website used to be thousands of dollars, it doesn’t have to be that way anymore thanks to WordPress and the Websitetology seminar. For $79 you get a full day of training, and we then offer a registration, hosting and WordPress installation package for a price of less than the cost of hosting alone from some hosting companies.

The fourth make-up artist had a site. It wasn’t amazing, but it did come up first in Google when I typed her name. It had samples of her work, a list of clients, and contact information. While the other three told me things like “a website won’t get me business, it’s all word of mouth”- the one with the site told me it gets her work all over the country, at much higher rates than what she can charge locally.

These days, it doesn’t matter how small you are, a website is critical for every business. We even did a site for a disabled, retired man who launches white birds at weddings and funerals- and he doesn’t have a computer or internet access, but he’s getting customers from it.

If you are reading this- because you needed a make-up artist in Dayton, Cincinnati or Columbus- I’m sorry. That’s one of the problems with Google searches. But if you give us a call- we’ll tell you who we ended up using.

While most of the people who take our seminar know what Google is, they have no clue on how it works. Matt Cutts works at Google, and is used to speaking to people who eat sleep and breathe Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so- some of this will be over a lot of peoples heads- but- he’s posted a series of videos of himself- answering questions:
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » Google/SEO

I’ve linked to his category- so as he adds more video, they should all be there. As of this writing, he has 10 videos, each about 5 minutes each. The bad thing about answering these as video, is that Google can’t index everything he says- a transcript- which would help him actually achieve Search Engine Optimization. Remember, google can’t tell what a picture, a video, or a podcast contains unless you explain it- either in Alt text or descriptions. Tagging each video with keywords helps, but nothing beats a complete transcript or a very good text description. By writing about his videos and linking back to them, I’m helping make his site rank higher on the subject of Search Engine Optimization- how ’bout that!
Some things I picked up from watching all 50 minutes (so you won’t have to):

Google likes content- optimized for both SEO and the user experience. It doesn’t help to have all the keywords if people don’t want to stick around on your site.

Google doesn’t give blogs a higher rank- however, if your site is totally “crawlable” and has clean code- that sure helps. W3C validation is good- but not totally critical to Google. He says the reason is simple: something like 40% of code out there has syntax errors. If you don’t know what a syntax error is- that’s an even better reason to use something like WordPress which writes most of your code for you.

Speaking of WordPress- I would almost bet my TiVo that Matt is using WordPress for his blog/site- I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

One thing he was pretty clear about- Google people don’t like to be fooled. SEO games to build rank are frowned upon. Always make your site look the same to the googlebot as a regular visitor would see it. Hiding white text on a white background would be bad. The issues of localization and cloaking are described pretty well- and if you need to know more- watch the videos.

If you don’t want to be a Search Engine Optimization slave- the simple answer is have good content- original content. Don’t copy and paste- quote and discuss. The more content you have on your topic- the better.

And as a note- Matt, if you do see this, I’d be honored to have a comment on this site!