Thursday 31 July 2008

Keep your content fresh for more traffic

Search engines and visitors love fresh content. By keeping your website updated you can keep both happy and therefore bring more traffic to your website.

Why is this the case? Well very few good websites sit still. There are new findings to report, further information to add, corrections to make to the copy etc. Many top websites grow over time as further information is added to them.

Visitors are more likely to return to sites that are maintained. Think through your own list of sites that you look at often - forums, news sites etc. If shops never add new stock then where's the interest to return to browse latest ranges?

Search engines look for these updates and expect them. If they don't see them then the site is thought to be unmaintained and drops in the rankings. A well maintained site on the other hand can climb with time.

But there is a balance. Over doing changes can be as bad, if not worse, than no changes. I've seen sites putting up random blocks of text on every visit. This doesn't trick the search engines - they see through it. There needs to be a balance between stability and additions to the site.

This can be as simple as a regularly updated news feature. Have a news page and list latest headlines on the home page. This acts not only as a link in from the home page to the news items - making it easier for all concerned to find the new pages, but it also means that the fresh content is shown on the home page. The news can be a mixture of news about your business and about news that affects the area that your business works in. For example, on comparemortgagerates.co.uk I try to add relevant financial news a couple of times per month.

If you are running a shop then keep the stock updated. As new lines arrive add them to your ranges on your website. This keeps the pages displaying the stock ranges fresh and adds new pages in the form of stock descriptions.

Even if you do not carry stock and maybe your company news isn't that exciting and neither is the business news in your area of expertise, there are still ways of producing fresh content. Maybe you are holding events that could be reported on? Publishing a photo with a caption on a regular basis seems to provide fresh content for the search engines and the people attending the event can be told that the photos will be published, which might attract them onto the site. If the pictures are good they will shoe friends and colleagues - just make sure that your site name is printed onto that photograph so everyone knows where it came from!

Even just a photo gallery of visitors or a diary of what's going on can be of interest to visitors and search engines. If you can think of original material to put on the site on a regular basis then it can be of help to the site's traffic.

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