TechLookz

Fresh Content

Google loves fresh content.

An associate of mine decided to work on website for his friend who is a mechanic. My friend/associate a database guy, and can't do much in the way of design or writing. He always says "I can make it work but can't make it look nice", and I fully agree:-)

He spent hours, possibly days, designing a logo and link bar for the home page. Almost a week later he uploaded the site (nothing but the index page) then just stopped working on it. The Googlebot made its appearance, indexed the single page site, then moved on.

He didn't touch the site for almost a year, and the site owner was little upset. He asked me to "just put something out there…anything is better than a home page with a bunch of dead links". I helped him out and quickly put together some light content and a site layout.

I've been watching the site for the past two months and the Googlebot has not been back. Google's cache shows a home page for the site that hasn't been up for months. The Googlebot visits other sites that I maintain that have new content added often on a much more frequent basis.

Point being - content, fresh content, is king. Google seems to avoid stale content. Give the Googlebot something new to read on each visit and my experience has shown that it will be back often.

If you're a "little guy", just getting ready to launch a new site, I have two suggestions;

1. Spend some time building the site before you start publishing it. So many people rush to put their "home page" out there hoping to get indexed quickly. This is a big mistake in my opinion. Make sure you have at least 10 - 20 pages of unique content before you launch your site. You will be much better off if you can have more content right at launch.

2. If you want the site to actually draw traffic, plan to add new content as often as possible. I try and add a minimum of 5 new pages a week to my primary sites. Obviously the more pages the better, but I'm not a full time SEO or web designer and have to be realistic. Set a schedule to add content that's do-able for you and stick to it.

If you follow these suggestions at the end of year one you'll have a site with 250 - 300 pages of original content. While surely not the largest on the web, if you target your keywords well in your copy a site of this size should help you start drawing some relevant traffic from the search engines. Keep this up and after 3 years you will have a site with close to 1,000 pages that should be drawing a fair amount of relevant search engine traffic.

Did I mention Google likes fresh content? :-)