Keeping content fresh to improve your search engine position.

What steps are needed to ensure that your site betters its current search engine position and maybe even gets to the top of the search engine listings? There are plenty of tricks and tips you can try for yourself.

The first and foremost is putting in plenty of unique, fresh content. This can be done in various ways and depends on your site and its content.

If you are a shopping site, then you will no doubt have a catalogue of products to sell. By loading these products and having a page per product, you create a large site. By then continuing to update these products, your site is seen as fresh. This can be as simple as adding new products on a weekly basis, or just going into the products and updating their descriptions a little on a weekly basis.

Maybe review your product texts and make sure that each one is at least 100 words, or 200 words. More importantly, make sure that you have not copied the text from any other sites as this is a huge killer - search engines will see it's 'duplicate content' and may not even list your pages.

Another trick is to feature a product or few products on the home page - a product of the week sort of feature. Set a day and once a week change the product or products and in doing so you are keeping the home page updated.

If you don't have the luxury of a product catalogue, then there are still ways of keeping the site fresh. An on-site blog to which you post a couple of times per week allows for a growing site and new, fresh content. On a similar vein, you can have a latest news section - either a page or a set of pages. Either of these can be worked so that some of the content appears on the home page to keep it fresh.

And a further idea is a forum. If you have regular visitors to the site they might like to participate in a forum. Every time they write a post they are adding to your site's material.

So why is this important? Well, the more content you have the more pages and more possible combinations of keywords are on your site. By having lots of extra text there are more chances of someone finding your site.

Also, by keeping your content updated, search engines see that the website is being maintained and should rate your site higher. They calculate that the site is not getting stale and full of old, outdated, information. Also, with forums, blogs, offers and the likes, real visitors are more interested in coming back to the site to see what you have to offer.

So keep adding content - it creates a lot more opportunities for people to find text on your site and it keeps the search engines interested.