Below is an article that I just republished in my newsletter written by Nathaniel Richman of nrichmedia. It discussed the important of keeping your website content fresh…
Too often I witness businesses spending a lot of time and effort putting together a brilliant website only to leave it as is for two
or three years – an eternity in Internet time. They figure, “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?”
Well, it may not be broke, but it’s just not doing as much for your business or organization as it could be. You need to keep the
content of your site fresh. This is important for both visitors to your site (especially repeat visitors) and search engines.
Let’s look at the first of these.
When people come to your site for the first time, if they see dated material, they’ll probably not take you too seriously – not a good first impression.
If you went into a grocery store and saw milk in the refrigerator that was past its expiry date, would you go back to that store?
(Okay, not all of us drink milk, but you get the point.)
Repeat visitors will be even more critical if they keep seeing the same material each time they visit your site.
The reason they’re checking back is to see… what’s new?! What if the radio station you listen to never played new songs? How long would you keep listening to it? Probably not very long. True, we do like some degree of familiarity and to be able to see/hear our favourites, but if there’s never anything new, we lose interest quickly.
As for search engines, they look at your site in a similar manner.
If there’s nothing new in a while, they’ll start dropping your rankings, as your site is considered not that important. Makes sense, really.
So, does this mean that you need to obsess about changing your page copy every day or to even hire someone to do that for you?
Not at all (do I hear a collective “phew”?).
There’s no rule, but the more often you can do it the better. A realistic plan for most small to medium sized businesses is to
freshen at least some of the content every two or three months. If you can do it more often, great. If you can only manage every six months, well that’s still better than nothing.
We’re not necessarily talking about rewriting the content on every page. Again, it’s up to you and your schedule as to how much you’re going to do, but at the very least have a news section on your home page or a top ten list that you can easily update on a regular basis. If you have the time/inclination to update more of your site or add new pages, even better.
Just do something. If it helps, schedule the first day of every even numbered month to update whatever you have time to. Trust me, your site visitors (potential customers) and the search engines will like you for it!
Another thing to consider when first developing the website (if you are going through a design studio or freelancer), is the possibility of using a content management system, or CMS. The general rule of thumb is that if you’re going to be updating once a month or more, it’s typically worth the extra costs to have them set up something like WordPress or Drupal. This way, you don’t have to mess about with HTML or anything like that, and you have one less hurdle in providing updated content to your website.
I heard a cool idea on how to think of a website’s activity; think of it like an EKG. Every time you post new content, think of it as activity on the EKG. When you don’t add any new content, the EKG is flatlining. We can all draw the parallel between a flatlining EKG and our website at that point – you don’t want it to happen.