Is your site a little less than fresh?
Image from Conversational Media Marketing
There are many ways to keep your website fresh including press releases, blog posts, and newsletters. For a list of ideas for adding content to your site see Part 10 of the article “Developing Your Website: Tools for Women“. An important point made in the blog entry “Why Your Web Site Needs an Oil Change” about frequent updating is that if your site maintenance is outsourced it can be costly to update your site. One solution to this cost is a website powered by a content management system so that new content can be added from within the company into the website template. If you don’t have time to update frequently, RSS feeds can be a way to keep your site fresh without writing new content. An RSS feed inserts information from another site into your site, like headlines with links to articles or blog entries detailed instructions of how RSS should be added to a site are described in the blog entry “RSS or a Website Freshness!”.
A fresh site keeps visitors coming back to check on the latest information, where a site that is not regularly updated will lose repeat audience, as explained in the article “7 tips to make your web site fail!”. Another reason to keep the content on your website fresh is that it affects where your site falls in search results. People are more likely to link to your site if there is new content on it, and the number of pages that link to a site effect how it ranks in search engine results. A Google patent recently divulged that when a page was last updated is included in the algorithm that determines search result rankings. Both ideas are explained in the blog entry “Google Patent Reminds Us To Keep It Fresh”.
Finally how often do you need to update your site for it’s freshness to be effective? The “Fresh Content” entry on the Web Site SEO and Technologies blog suggests that you check how often your competitors’ websites are updated and add new content more frequently in order to raise your search results above theirs.
Fred said,
October 10, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Lizz,
Thanks for referencing us! Yeah, stale content stiiii-inks.
One thing I’d like to clarify, is that we usually don’t advocate a full-on CMS, as they are often dreadful for search. Instead, we have lots of static areas on sites and then CMS areas on things that do need to get updated a lot — press releases, news sections, events, etc.
That way, what’s fresh stays fresh, without affecting content that’s more permanent, and without messing up any SEO goals for the site.
Anyways, thanks again for the links and welcome a new reader to your RSS!!
Best,
Fred