How To Launch Your New Site

In this tutorial, you’re going to learn how to launch your website to search engines and use ping settings effectively. But before anything else, I’m going to provide quick explanations.

First of all, WordPress has the ability to notify search engines that your website has gone live. If you’re wondering what “ping” means, it helps you automatically notify different search engines and online services that you’ve published a new post or page so they can check it out. Simply put, if you often create posts or pages, pings can actually help you rank higher in search engines.

Now that we’ve got that covered, allow me to show you exactly what you need to do to get this started.

Step 1

What you need to understand here is that, whenever you install a new WordPress blog, by default it is set so that when Google or any other search engine comes to your website, they will index your site. So if you’re not yet ready to go live, head on to Settings >> Reading.

Step 2

At the very bottom, you should be able to see Search Engine Visibility. Select ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’.

Now it’s up to the search engines to honor this request. This, however, helps you tell search engines that you’re not ready to go live just yet. Once you’re ready, you can unselect it and click on the Save Changes button.

Step 3

In order to set things up so that whenever you publish a post or page and you want to notify search engines that you’ve just created a new post and they should come check it out, you need to hop on to Writing under ‘Settings’.

At the very bottom, you’re going to see the Update Services, which says:

“When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services”

This allows you to ping these services so you can notify search engines and other online services that you have a brand-new post or page and they should come check it out.

Step 4

In order to get this list, you can get free list online. Head on to Google and type in “WordPress ping list (plus whatever year that you’re searching)”.

Next, click Google Search and you’ll be able to find the updated ping list. In this example, it’s about 2014.

You’ll want to get the most updated ones so go ahead and look through the results and grab the list.

What you’ll get are simply URLs of websites and ping list, so it’s very easy to do. All you have to do is to find the latest list.

Step 5

Highlight the whole list, right-click, and click on ‘Copy’.

Go back to your WordPress dashboard and paste the list right there.

And that’s it! Your site is now ready.

Take note that you can find other ping lists by constantly searching for them. There are lots of different ping lists out there but as much as possible, keep it simple and keep it to the most basic one.

Now that you’ve learned how to launch your website, you will be able to notify search engines every time you create a new post or page. Good luck!