Fresh Content
In considering SEO for your web site, look at it from the perspective of potential visitors and their favorite search engine.
When people search the internet, they are looking for information and don’t want obsolete information. If you’re desparate to get a cup of coffee and want to know the closest place, you don’t want to find the place that went out of business last year.
Google wants to be people’s favorite search engine, so they want to deliver what people want. Therefore they consider how freshness (or staleness) of the website. If a site hasn’t been updated in a long time, then there’s a good chance the information is obsolete. That means, it’s probably not the first site to return to people searching for that great cup of coffee.
Now let’s get back to your website. If search engines want it fresh, then it needs a steady supply of new content. That presents two big challenges:
Challenge #1: How to get that new content into the web site. This is one of those that’s best solved up front. If you have a static web site or a flash-based website, then getting new content can be more difficult and/or expensive. Small companies usually go this route and then are chained to the person developing the website for any updates (which means money and time). New content could also mean new menu items (which means more money and time).
On the other hand, there is software out there that makes adding content very easy, like a blog (eg wordpress) or a content management system (CMS) such as joomla. With this type of software, adding a new article is point-and-click without needing to know how to program. The new article appears in the right spot.
What is even nicer with a blog or CMS is that your single new article can be leveraged on multiple pages. Maybe the title is shown on the front page of your site as the latest news. A brief of the article can be shown on another page listing articles in that category and finally the full article on a brand new page. With 1 new article, you have 3 fresh pages. Fantastic.
Challenge #2: Most people in business have plenty of information and comments about their company and industry. Ideas are rarely a problem. The problem is time. Getting time to write a new article can be very difficult, especially with so much to do already.
Scheduling time to write an article can work, but I find that usually the time is spent doing something else: sales, accounting tasks, taking care of something that is taking twice as long as it should, etc.
Another option is to pay someone to do it for you. For $100/page, you can have as much new content as you’d like.
What’s going to work best for you? Impossible to say, but if you’ve found a way to get those other pesky tasks done on-time, then the same approach can work for new content.
Final Comment: OK, so fresh content on your site is important. But how “fresh” does it need to be? How often do you have to add new content?
That depends on your industry. If your competitor web sites are rarely updated with anything new, then adding new content quarterly or twice a year would put you way ahead of them. On the other hand, if they constantly update their site, then you’ll need to do updates at least as often as them.
…keep plugging away at getting those new customers….
Tags: Blog, CMS, Joomla, SEO, wordpress
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October 8, 2008 at 1:22 am
[...] how often do you need to update your site for it’s freshness to be effective? The “Fresh Content” entry on the Web Site SEO and Technologies blog suggests that you check how often your [...]