Posted: 2013-03-05 08:50:32
It is not just quality and quantity of website content that matters on web pages, but how up-to-date it is.
If you want your website to be found by search engines, you should be looking at all three of these elements.
The best way to understand this is to think about yourself making a search on Google, or Bing or any other search engine for that matter. You are looking for some specific information, so you type in your search term. The ideal end result for you is that you get a list and somewhere on the first page of that list is up-to-date information which is highly relevant to your query.
It is unlikely that information that is two years out of date will fill you with confidence. It may be correct, but you will probably have to double check it - and that will just eat up some time.
If the search engine repeatedly delivered information that was irrelevant, or out of date (no matter how you phrased the question), you might feel as though you should look elsewhere.
This is why the rules of how search engines work are constantly being tweaked to out manoeuvre the spammers and push the most relevant and up-to-date content to the fore.
It therefore stands to reason that even highly relevant content will fail to make the grade in search engine ranking terms unless it is clearly up-to-date. The only exception to this is very highly specialised content in highly niche areas, but even the website content still needs to be relevant.
There is one one other very good reason why you should at least check your website content on a regular basis.
It is unlikely in this day and age that your business will stay the same year in and year out. You could be making assertions about the business in the website content that are now entirely untrue.
Equally, the website may not reflect recent changes in the business and new services or products offered, so you could be missing valuable opportunities to find new prospects.
Do it now while you have a few minutes - go and read your own website content and make sure it is correct and up-to-date.