Fresh website content helps SEO

I come across a lot of websites who would like me to wave the magic wand and skyrocket them to the top of the search engine results for their main products with the minimum of effort. It's a fair enough point. Most people who put their car into a garage just want it fixed, they don't want to get oil on their hands. Remember though that if you never do anything to your car you are likely to be scolded by the mechanic and told to maintain it a bit better if you want it to run better.

Maybe that's not the best analogy, but the same could be said of websites, especially in relation to their content. A website that sits stagnant and has the same content from one year to the next will never lead the charge in the search engines. Sometimes these old sites even have a "last updated" date that is several years ago.

If you ran a shop on the high street you'd change the window every now and again to keep it fresh and keep new customers coming in, and more importantly, entice old customers to come back again. Same goes for your website. If nothing on it ever changes, why should visitors come back, let alone search engines. Never update your website and it will be relegated to the shopping equivalent of a backstreet with all the failing shops on it, dust on the window displays and no customers.

You want to get back on the high street and have the hordes piling to your website, so you need to freshen up your virtual window on a regular basis. New information, new products, new articles, industry news and anything else you can find to write about should be going on your site to keep it fresh. And believe me, once you find your feet in doing this, updating your own website is addictive.

So we know that updates are critical to new and returning visitors, but how do you go about it. Firstly I'd say that you really want to set yourself a schedule for your updates. Might be daily website updates or weekly. Schedule a website update once a month at the very least, but preferably more often.

There are many tools your web developer can integrate to help you update your website. If you're fairly savvy with dreamweaver you can just buy a copy and get on with it. If you like the idea of proper design software but are a little daunted by Dreamweaver then ask your developer about Macromedia Contribute. It allows you to work on just the bits of your site that you are happy updating by yourself.

Blogs can be a great way of adding fresh content to your site with the minimum of effort. Everyone is using a blog at the moment from Google to people keeping online diaries. They are really easy to use and your developer should be able to integrate one into your site so that it looks really slick. I've integrated both Blogger and Wordpress into websites and both are a great way for anyone to add content to their website quickly.

Another way to ensure you have full control over updating your website when and where you want is with a content management system (CMS). Your developer can advise you on all the details, but CMS are much like an online version of using Macromedia Contribute. CMS like Mambo and PHPNuke are a good place to start. You can set up users and allow them to access and update all, or just part of your website. They can be tricky to learn, but once your head is in the groove, you'll be updating your site every day.

All in all, these are just tools that you can put in place to make updating your website easier. You can still email your update to your web developer, but if you are doing it every day or every second day, it wont take long before they start making the suggestions above by themselves.

Whatever method you choose, update regularly and traffic will just keep going up.

(I'm off to find some new analogies cos that mechanic one was frankly crap) :-)

30-Sep-2005