Your website is a living, breathing entity on the internet. Every update you make to your website once it goes live on the internet plays a large part in its interaction with visitors, customers, and search engines. When you are not actively making changes or updates to your website, search engines will view your site as a dead entity -- meaning it has no life and likely does not offer very much to its viewer. If a site is frequently updated with quality content, search engines will see that and love you for it.

Now that we have gone over a basic reason why keeping your website fresh is so important, lets dig deeper into this topic. Here are five reasons why fresh content is critical to your website and SEO.

Although keeping fresh content on your site is a great thing, it does not always mean that this will automatically give you higher indexing on search engines. However, the more frequently you update your website with articles, downloads, new images, and new web pages, the more frequently search engines will visit your website. When a search engine looks at your site more frequently, it gives you the opportunity to achieve higher rankings based on the content you provide as long as it is relative content to the page.

Google is by far the most frequently used search engine and this should come as no surprise. Since Google is considered to be the king or queen of all search engines, it has a huge amount of influence on webmasters and how websites are constructed. When Google expresses its love for websites that update their sites frequently, this is a sure sign that you should continue to add fresh content to your website as often as you can. With that being said, you do not want to make site updates just to make updates. Make sure this is a necessary change and adds additional value to the site viewers. If you update your content often with reliable and valuable information for the site viewer then you have a better chance of Google ranking your site higher with each update.

When you publish new content to your website, you present more opportunities for your site to contain more keywords. Keywords are considered to be very high on the algorithm chart for search engine indexing and ranking. Frequently added content, such as blog or article postings allow you to optimize the article with keywords that can attract visitors to your site.

For example, say you maintain an insurance quote website and are updating the site four to five times a week with new articles, you can focus each of those articles on a different type of insurance, such as “auto insurance” or “life insurance.” Each time you add a new article you incorporate valuable keywords that help search engines recognize your website as a place searchers can visit for their specific insurance needs.

All webmasters aim to become an industry “authority” in Google’s eyes. The strategy of becoming an authority website is by abiding by the SEO adage, “content is king.” The more informative and valuable content you publish on your site that relates to your industry, then the greater amount of authority your site has. Frequently publishing news related to your industry is also another effective strategy in becoming an authority site. Each time you update your website with a new story, another page is created and indexed by Google. The more you post about a specific topic if the content is good, then the stronger of an authority you become and the more people will begin to trust your website and business as a whole. If you are consistently posting quality content then your users will become more loyal. Loyalty is not something that can be bought so even the small business owners have the opportunity to compete with the big dogs within their industry.

Another important reason to update your website with valuable and useful content is to keep your current customers up-to-date as well as provide any necessary information for new visitors that could potentially be converted into customers. Your fresh content can help to provide new visitors with valuable information about your business and your products or services offered. If a visitor is led to your site through a search engine then you need to convince them that your products or services offered are the best choice for them compared to the millions of other results presented during their search. Help your viewers understand why they need or could benefit from your product or service. The more information a potential customer can access then the more likely they will be able to make an informed decision to purchase.

Regularly updating your website with fresh content will not only create appreciation and loyalty from your visitors, but it will also put you in good standings with Google and other search engines. If you would like some help with updating your website or have questions about the type of information you should be adding, give Northeast Kingdom Online a call today to set up an initial consultation and will help point you in the right direction!