Keeping content up to date isn’t just a matter of being a good do-bee anymore. Beyond visitors staying engaged, the search engines want to know that you care about updating your content (and they’ll start sliding you down the rankings if you don’t).

The problem is that sometimes, there’s just not much new stuff to promote! News might be a little slow, no events are coming up, and no new products are ready to be introduced.

So how are you supposed to maintain that “new site smell” when there’s nothing new to add? Here’s a quick and dirty way to fill in those slower periods:

1. Pick a content area on your home page to edit. (your content management system lets you edit your home page, right?)
2. Call it something catchy, but a bit generic like “Highlights,” “Product Spotlight,” “What’s New,” etc.
3. Choose some aspect of your business – a particular product or service, a certain challenge your users face…any small, digestible morsel of what you do.
4. Write a 1- to 2-sentence teaser and include a link to an existing page of your site that addresses that product/service/challenge/whatever else. Check and publish your edits.
5. Repeat this process every 2-3 weeks as necessary.

The great thing here is that almost anyone can do this.  More likely than not, you offer more than one product or service, or can break down your single product or service into smaller pieces or challenges.

There are two great things about this approach:

• Depending on the breadth of your offerings, you could be sitting on “fuel” for months’ worth of these mini-updates.
• You’re not actually doing much work – you could probably crank out 5 of these teasers in half an hour or less.

Now, you may have noticed the quotation marks around “fresh” in the title of this post.  Bear in mind that this is no replacement for “real” new content.  When time allows, you’ll almost always be better off composing some white papers or gathering some case studies and client testimonials.

However, if the news train has slowed down, or you’re short on time,  these steps may help preserve the “Illusion of Freshness” just enough to keep your users’ (and the search engines’) faith in you.

Questions?  Concerns?  Let’s hear them in the comments below!

(P.S. If you don’t have access to edit your home page content this easily, consider giving eMagine a call!)

Most of the various learned analyses of Google’s Panda search-algorithm update of last spring (and ongoing via numerous micro-updates) focused on its effect on so-called “content farms” …and on those legitimate sites that had the misfortune to be confused with such farms by the new algorithm, and thus were unceremoniously dropped many pages in Google’s results pages.  So if your site was not a content farm – and didn’t resemble one – you probably breathed a sigh of relief and [Read more...]