Probably half of our clients rarely, if ever, update their sites. We don't update our home page often, but we do blog semi-regularly. It's just become more important to all of us to update our web site's content regularly. Why? A post just appeared ont the official Google Blog (you didn't know they had one, did you?) entitled Giving you fresher, more recent search results, Google will now more heavily weight freshness of content. How heavily? They're rather vague about that, but the article seems to indicate that this will be a major shift for Google. My take-away from this is
if your site and another are about equal in content value, the site that's been more recently updated will appear higher in the search results. So now it's no longer sufficient to have great, well-structured content. That content needs to be fresh as well. So here's your assignment:
- Look at your Google Analytics and see what key words people are searching for when they find you.
- Look at your site in the administrator side and see what articles relate to those terms.
- See when you last updated those articles.
- If it's been a few months, see if there's anything new you can add to the article.
- Set yourself a regular schedule (weekly, monthly, quarterly) to update content.
The alternative is to start slipping in the search rankings.