SEO Step By Step Guide– 77. How often should you update your website’s content?

In the last post, we discussed about the uses and importance of having RSS in our websites. However, RSS is useless unless we update our website regularly. One of the questions that often cross our mind is that, how often we should update our website’s content. Is there an optimum frequency at which we should update our website’s content?

There are no hard and fast rules on the frequency at which we should update our websites. It depends more on the nature of your website’s traffic. If the same visitors are visiting your website frequently, they will expect an update or they will expect to find the latest information available on your website. It also depends on the nature of your website. If you are a service-oriented company, there will not be much change in the main pages of your website. You will be able to update only when you are adding new services or changing the scope of the existing services. On the other hand, if you are dealing with products, then your visitors may expect to see new products added to your products gallery.

If it is a news-oriented site, people will expect hourly updates and for content or informative articles, oriented site people may expect weekly updates. It is recommended
that you update your website’s content at least once a month. The frequency of indexing varies depending on the frequency of your updates. If you update your website more frequently, search engine bots will visit your site more frequently to update its database.

While updating your website you must make sure that it is not done just for the sake of updates but your updates should add value to your website and only then, your website visitors will find it useful. Some of the pages that give us chances for frequent updates are the news page, testimonials page, resources page, etc. You can include new customer testimonials every month. You must have a system in place that will make sure that customer testimonials are procured from the latest customers and updated in the website regularly. In the news section, it is not necessary that the news feeds be always about your services and your products. You can also include news items related to your niche industry that will be useful to your visitors. This will attract more traffic and it will also ensure repeat visitors to your websites, as they will find your website resourceful.

If you happen to update your website too frequently, then you must make sure to keep the search engines updated regarding the changes and one of the ways of doing it is to use XML sitemaps that will tell the search engines how frequently you are likely to update your website. You can also submit your latest updates in sites like Digg, Delicious, etc. This will ensure that your website is visited by the search engine bots as soon as you update your site.

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