How Fresh is Your Site Content?
People (and robots) prefer fresh content over stale!
by Dave Maloney
You may not want to hear this: If you thought you were "all done" with your website because you've written and laid out your site content exactly the way you want it on each page...well, that was a good start.
Your web pages are full of great unique content, search engine optimized around quality-traffic-producing keyword phrases, great! Google sends its robots to crawl your pages, and then determines how high each of your pages will rank on a search results page, based on factors such as keyword relevance, quantity and quality of inbound links to that page, and... freshness.
If you never touch the site content on those pages again, you'll notice that their placement in search engine results will start to drop. As your content has been sitting and getting stale, your pages are being bumped down in rank by new or updated pages with fresh content. Google's primary directive is to provide the best, most relevant results to what people are searching for, and included in "most relevant" is "how recent." Even the frequency of your pages being crawled and indexed by Google's robots is adjusted based on the freshness or staleness of your website. If you put the task of refreshing your site content on the backburner, the Googlebots will backburner your site and crawl your pages less often; whereas if you give them something new to chew on each time they stop by, you may notice that they start to come around more often.
Create - and keep creating - unique, fresh content!
So, the bad news is, if you thought you were "done" with your website and the new customers are just going to be rolling in forever, that's not quite true; you will always have more work to do. But the good news is, you don't need to start over. You just want to add fresh content - so that people that have already seen your site will be interested to see it again, and robots having crawled your site will want to crawl it again more frequently, so new visitors will find you in the search results and come see what's new and exciting, and so on. Easy, right?
If your site is on a content management system (CMS), making changes to your site content is easy. Adding new links, a new call to action, an update your company's "About Us", even changing a few images will invigorate the freshness your site content, both in human and robotic eyes. If you have a business blog, (which you should!) keep it going with new and interesting topics. You can even update older topics; if the information is still has value, let Google know by adding a follow-up to it or link it with another article that may not have been posted yet. Blog comments are relevant site content too, to both humans and bots.
New isn't always better...
Just plunking in new site content is not going to help just because it's new. Google's scoring formula is still based on search relevance and inbound links; what gets a page's rankings up is what people find interesting and of value, and want to share and link to it. Anything well-maintained will always be more appealing to the world and have a much higher book value than neglected, and Google will reward you for your efforts.
©Pagetender LLC - Internet Marketing - All Rights Reserved.