When you blog about something on your website, you want people to know about it. The more people that know about it the better. And the more blog search engines that know about it, the better it is for your search engine optimisation (SEO).

Tim Geyssens has created a very useful package for Umbraco (in fact, he has created several) that lets some of the more important blog-related sites know that you've published new content or updated your existing content in your blog. From the package documentation:

By default, the package is set up to work with the umbracoblog package so that every time you create a new blog post or update an existing one, this package sends out a ping (asynchronously) to a list of sites specified in the config file to notify them immediately of the new or updated post. You can easily configure the package to work with your own document types instead of the umbracoblog package.

The package is called PingXMLRPC, and it is available from the Umbraco package repository. Just go to the developer section of Umbraco, expand the Packages folder and click on the Umbraco package repository link. Choose Website Utilities, and then PingXMLRPC. Here you can download and install the package. You can also link directly to it here: Tim's excellent PingXMLRPC package for Umbraco.

The documentation [pdf] is linked to from here too and it explains how you can customise it for your own purposes. I have set mine up to ping a long list of blog search engines every time a blog entry is published, including technorati.com and blogsearch.google.com, among many others. A great way to increase your online profile without doing very much extra work at all.

David