SEO Report: Updating Your Content

We’ve talked about the need for news and RSS in your websites. However,  RSS is useless unless you update your website’s content regularly. So, how often should you really update your website’s content – is there an optimum time-frame during which you should update our website’s content, are exact measured updates required, or can the frequency be random?

Good news – there isn’t a hard and fast rule concerning the frequency at which you should update your websites. It depends more on the nature of your website’s traffic; if this is constantly changing, it is not so urgent as if the same visitors are visiting your website frequently – in which case they will expect an update or at least some of the latest information available on your website.

This particular answer also hinges on the nature of your website. If you are a service-oriented company,you won’t see constant change in the main pages of your website; updating only when you are adding new services or changing the scope of the existing services. However, when you are dealing with products, then your visitors may expect to see new items added to your products gallery.

If it is a news-oriented site or blog, you will have to stay on top of things much more closely, as people will expect hourly updates for breaking news, daily or several times a week for content or informative articles, or weekly updates for more basic websites. You should definitely update your website’s content at least once a month. The frequency of indexing varies depending on the frequency of your updates. When you update your website more frequently, search engine bots will visit your site more frequently to update their database and your visitors will always see fresh results in the SERPs.

Another advantage to regularly updating your website is that your updates can add value to your website and your website visitors will find it useful. Some of the pages that offer chances for frequent updates are the news page, testimonials page, resources page, etc. You can also include new customer testimonials every month by putting a system in place that will secure customer testimonials from the latest customers and update the website accordingly. In the news section,you don’t have to make news feeds be always about your services and your products. You cover news items related to your niche industry that will be useful to your visitors. This will attract more traffic and will encourage repeat visits to your websites, as your visitors will find your website resourceful.

If you happen to update your website very frequently, then you must make sure to keep the search engines updated regarding the changes. You can do this by using XML sitemaps that will tell the search engines how frequently you are likely to update your website, or by submitting your latest updates to sites like Digg, Delicious, etc. to ensure that your website is visited by the search engine bots as soon as you update your site.

Remember, adding new content also increases the overall value of your site if you remember to use SEO in each new piece of content.