Content is Still King: Why You Need to Regularly Update Your Web Site
This is a follow up to my previous post concerning keyword research and niche selection. In that post, I discussed how to do keyword research and find market opportunities on the Internet. It is well known that once you have selected a niche, built a web site, optimized it for the search engines, and added some content, that you cannot just sit back and relax. The importance of keeping live, fresh, and up to date content on your site on an ongoing basis is talked about ad nauseum in various Internet marketing circles. I wanted to provide a real life case study about this situation.
Again, referring back to my Rachael Flatt fan site, I failed to add new content following her free skate and 4th place finish at Skate America, which ended October 25. In fact, I didn’t make an entry about her final standings until November 1st. I have a Google Alert, however, that sends me a daily email with news and blog post results about her competitions, and there was a huge rise in the number of articles written about her in the days following Skate America. After a week of this increased press coverage, I was no longer on page 1 of the Google SERPs for the keyword phrase “rachael flatt”. In fact, I had actually fallen all the way to page 3!
On November 1, I posted two short items, and within two days was back up to page 2, but the bottom of page 2. There continued to be new press coverage about her, since she would be appearing in late November at the Cup of Russia.
Tracking the Google position of the site for a couple more weeks, I again fell to page 3 without any posting activity. Then, with the Cup of Russia in progress, but the ladies’ portion not yet begun, I back posted to Nov 4th and Nov 8th, just posting links to other people’s YouTube videos of her. Then, I added commentary on November 21 for her short program, and November 27th for her overall performance. During that time, I slowly crawled back up the SERPs, despite ongoing news coverage surrounding the event.
As of today, November 30th, I’m back on page 1 in the #8 spot. The only sites ahead of me are incredibly well established sites, such as her official bio with US Figure Skating, her profile on about.com, her Wikipedia entry, a couple YouTube videos, and the Los Angeles Times newspaper. That’s not bad web site company to be in, out of 191,000 broad results, and 22,400 exact match results.
The moral of the story is this: Updating your web site AT LEAST WEEKLY is crucial to keeping a top Google position. Those highly coveted Top 10 positions are hard to come by and even harder to maintain, but they are impossible to maintain without new content. It is advisable that, each and every day, you do the following basic tasks to build your search engine position:
1). Add new, keyword rich, text content and make sure this content gets picked up by feed or ping services for distribution and notification.
2). Somewhere else online, post a video, podcast, an article, a forum post, or a blog comment, with a link pointing back to your site.
Doing just these two things, day in and day out, can help your Search Engine Marketing efforts enormously. On top of that, if you have Google Analytics code embedded on your site (you do, right???), you can track the results of these efforts and learn which ping services or which forums and blogs or video sites you should be focusing on to drive traffic to your site. Remember, your marketing efforts are pointless if you don’t know which sources are bringing you traffic, so as always, test, test, test!
Until next time,
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