Updating your website content is a vital aspect of search engine optimization (SEO). Without frequently updated content, you are less likely to rank in search engine results. Keeping your site content updated may sound like a difficult and time-consuming task, but with a strategy and schedule in place, it does not have to be.
For many businesses, a good portion of their website does not change very often and so they have to find new ways to change their site content. Blogging and updating a news section of a website are two ways to keep content changing and fresh.
Why Frequent Updating is Important
Changing your site content often is important due to the way search engine bots and spiders “crawl” your site. Search engines, like Google, have their own automated “bots” which crawl all of the websites on the internet. They do this in order to index information about your site, providing searchers with the best possible results for their given search query. If a bot comes to your site one week and comes back a month later to discover that nothing has changed, it will wait longer, say 3 months, before coming back again. Bots will also do the opposite and come back more often if they discover that you are making frequent updates. Thus, you can train the bots to index your site more often. This is important, because when you do make a vital change to your site, you want to make sure the bot discovers it fairly quickly.
How to Keep your Content Fresh
Site content
Update your site content whenever you have new products or services. Revisit your site content at minimum on a quarterly basis to make sure it is still relevant and accurate.
Blogs
Starting a blog is the easiest way to continually add new content to your site. Blog about hot topics related to your industry and keep a schedule that allows you to update weekly.
News Section
If you often have news updates, include a news section on your website and update it regularly with news and press releases.
Events
Create an “event calendar” to promote things going on at your company. Only do this if you have a substantial amount of events, otherwise your calendar will look bare.
FAQs
An FAQ section is great for SEO and can be constantly updated with new questions from your customers.
Pictures
Update the pictures on your site often to reflect company events and changes in your services/products. Make sure your images have descriptive ALT tags for optimal SEO.
For assistance with updating your site content and other SEO tactics, contact Informatics.
