| Google and the search engines live or die by the quality of their search results. If their results aren't relevant, then searchers will go elsewhere, and their empires will crumble.
Often, more recent information is more relevant. Think of news stories or industry trends. Is it any use if Google keeps throwing up five year old articles when you type in “investment tips”, or news about Bill Clinton when you type in “new president”?
So, what has this got to do with SEO?
SEO is about understanding what search engines and web users want. If both want fresh, relevant, compelling content – then it makes sense to provide it.
And a company that offers what search engines and users want tends to rank higher in the search results, and consequently make more sales.
Google's view on fresh content
It's one thing to speculate on the power of fresh content. It's another to hear it championed by the world's most successful web company. Here's Google in their November '08 webmaster search engine optimisation documents:
“Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors [discussed in the document]...This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means. Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site's reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.”
Furthermore, on the topic of “freshness”, Google's historical patent data is revealing. A document is stale if it is: “no longer updated, diminished in importance, or superceded by another document“.
In practical terms, that means that your site and webpages will be ranked higher by Google if:
- Your content has been recently uploaded or amended (more likely to be relevant)
- You have lots of recently added inbound links (shows web users see you as relevant)
- You have lots of traffic (lots of visitors mean it's probably a useful page)
- People spend a long time on your page/site (the longer they're there, the more useful the content)
Further SEO benefits...
We've established then that Google loves regularly updated content – but what other SEO benefits does fresh content offer? Here are just a few:
- Become an “authority”. If you become a valued resource for opinion or information, then more people will link to you. If there's one thing that search engines love, it's links. It's also a great way to improve your reputation and credibility.
- Better spread of keywords. Keywords are the backbone of search. They're the phrases that people enter into search engines to find what they need. The more combinations of keywords you can rank for, the more traffic you'll get. By adding lots of content related to your business, you'll be adding lots of phrases and words to your site that the search engines can find and index.
- The more you update your site, the more frequently search engines will crawl your web pages for indexing.
- If you blog you may also appear in blog search engines, or even on the front page of community sites such as Digg.
All of these factors can help drive an amazing amount of traffic to your site. Particularly if you work with an established SEO company to get the best results.
As a final note, remember that content is about users first, search engines second. Provide the right content for users, and the search engines will follow. Combine a targeted content strategy with professional SEO agency services and you could see your web conversions increase dramatically. |
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