I would stay away from pingoat as the old owner at least where going through the ping list and was reporting pages that he thought where spam.

No to pinging.

Your page need to have an RSS or Atom feed for pinging to be effective.

If your page has this, then you should ping the page about each 12 hours, at least thats what I do.

Don't ping each time you update as the services will ignore you if you ping to much.

Use Joseph Tierney's excellent Blogpinger Pro to ping your sites.

Blogpinger pro is a free software I believe.

go here and access theres huge pinglist to use for pinging.

Ping all those services with your page adress.

hxxp://w3.crappytools.com/pingurls/list.asp
Change the x to t and w3 to www

Hope it helps.

Best regards
Kandor