Do you keep a consistent posting schedule? I'm asking because I wonder if a consistent posting schedule affects when your site is crawled and in turn affects your SEO. I'd like to think that a site that posts consistently, is crawled on a consistent "pattern", which lends a hand in terms of naturalness. What do you think?
Regular posting and to a lesser extent pinging certainly helps to keep the bots coming back. For a typical blog, 1-2 posts per day at random times (to make it look like a human is manually updating the site rather than updating on cron) is plenty. Of course, if you have a very high PR site with frequently updating content then Gbot will be hitting your site every few minutes. Scheduling posts when you load up your new WP blog is a great hands off strategy. Blogs that don't update tend to languish, while blogs that do update regularly are getting that constant "freshness" boost that translates into better rankings and more traffic.
If you write 5 articles a day, make sure spiders are coming to you daily. If you do 5 articles a week...set it to crawl daily and start posting more. For me, honest rate of posting has always seemed to get me the highest rankings
