Adding Content Regularly

You have to add content to your site on a regular basis – if you can add daily content, that is great, but only if it is high quality. If you can’t maintain a high standard, you should back off to twice a week or once a week, just to be sure your additions are worthy of reading by your visitors.

Consumers want quality. Search engines want to make consumers happy. You can try to game the search engines by getting gazillions of keyword heavy pages and links out the wazoo, but in the end Google will smarten up to black hat tactics and kick you down the SERPs for failure to deliver on promises made.

Seriously, which would you rather visit – a site that has 50 cures for acne, 48 of which are useless, or a site with 2 cures, both of which are valid and working ways to solve your problem? In the first case, you have to sift through, looking for the 2 that work, and eventually getting exasperated and leaving – or in the second case you have what you need right in front of you.

You want high quantities of content, don’t get me wrong. How fast you build it needs to be controlled by quality though. You never want to get so caught up in quantity that you leave quality behind. Make sure that every bit of content you have on your site is valuable to the user. This will aid you over time as Google continues to take user experience into account in their ranking algorithm.

Some people click on the up and down arrows beside Google results, while others report in different ways. You get more organic links if your site is truly helpful. You want these good reports from unbiased users that your site is navigable, easy to use and had the information that they were looking for.

RULE:

Figure out how much content you can produce / afford per month.

Post your content at equal intervals. If you have four new pages a month, post one per week. If you have ten, post every three days. If you have thirty, post one a day. If you have one hundred twenty, post four per day.

This will space you out well and keep attention coming in the right proportion. Also have an RSS feed to your site so people can be updated on a regular basis.

You have to look towards optimizing your content  for Search Engines like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft’s BING, but be sure it is relevant and valuable to your customers as well. This will get you the best long term results.

When you concentrate only on getting pages up fast and resort to designing whole sections of your site simply to be stuffed with keywords – that is spamming your own site! How crazy is it to spam yourself? Stop and take a look at what YOU would like to see in a website.

If you use consistency and high quality as your guidelines, your site will grow steadily and gain a good reputation for the long term outlook.