If you’re looking to portray a professional, cutting edge image, the last thing you want is for old content to undermine your website’s credibility. Both from a visitor’s point of view and that of the search engine crawlers, new content can be hugely beneficial.
In terms of search engine rankings, fresh copy and relevant new pages are a great way of getting a major boost for your site. New content means that there are additional keywords bulking up your potential organic search pulling power. Plus, whenever you add fresh copy to a site, the search engines send out what we call crawlers or spiders, which will then process the information and index the page.
Bearing in mind that potential visitors and clients can search for pretty much anything, it almost goes without saying that having additional related keywords and phrases on a site can only be a positive move. As with all things though, it has to be done in moderation. Having a sprawling site full of hundreds of pages, each one containing a wealth of copy overloaded with keywords, will more than likely put off any users once they’ve arrived.
News feeds and blogs tend to be a very popular and highly successful way of boosting a website’s content without cluttering up key pages. They update regularly and are a great for providing additional internal links, whilst also drawing in casual visitors. You can also show off your industry expertise and really add some value to your website’s message with.
From a purely stylistic point of view though, content updates are essential on a number of levels. For example, would you buy from a site that still had Christmas banners in the middle of May? Or one that proudly boasts having products that were ‘Brand New for 2007’? Whilst these may be extreme examples, there are thousands of sites on the Internet suffering as a result of not keeping copy right up-to-date.
To maintain a credible image amongst visitors, every aspect of a website needs to be considered. From the design of the Home Page to the content of the copy, it all needs to be up to scratch. Thorough checks of your copy can be time consuming though, particularly if you’re operating a large site; however, the benefits of doing so are clear. You don’t want to be losing customers due to a typo filled product description, or suffer in search engine rankings as a result of continued inactivity; so content really is key.
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