The 7 mistakes search engine optimizers make - part 4

Here's the next installment of the Mini-Course.

The 7 Mistakes Search Engine Optimizers Make – Part 4

Failure to regularly update content.

This usually strikes fear into the heart of those web masters that have permanent writers' block.

Or the folks that just hate to write.

Let's put this Mistake into a contextual metaphor.

What would happen if you got a newspaper delivered to your door step every day and it contained the same news, just with a different date?

You'd stop getting that paper delivered, right?

Right.

So, if you think that a Search Engine Spider is going to crawl your site over and over again when the content remains the same – guess again.

Now – let's be clear. A Search Engine Spider can find your site a variety of different ways. Often, it visits your site regularly once it has a copy of it in its own index, but it can also find your site by following links from other sites to you.

Now, once you stop getting new links to your site, what is the incentive to have your site crawled?

Fresh Content.

You see, if Google visits your site over a period of time and sees that your site's content has changed, it makes a note to visit your site more often so that it can re-index that new content and make it available in its Search Engine.

There's some speculation as to how much content has to change, but the popular consensus is that you need to have 1,000 bytes of information different on your page for Google to register it as a "Change of Content."

This usually equates to a few hundred words.

Why do we want Google to crawl out site often?

Lots of reasons – let's look at them all.

1) When your site is new, when Google visits your site, it usually only crawls the first few pages and indexes only the home page. So, by causing Google to revisit your site often, it will crawl deeper each time. Before you know it, your entire site will be in the Search Engine Index. (Either way, Google will eventually get around to your entire site – if you followed the advice in Lesson #1 and made sure that every page of your site is spiderable. But if Google knows your site is updated often, our friend the Googlebot will return more often.


2) When you're experimenting with your On Page and Off Page Optimization Factors, you want to see the results of your changes quickly. If you have the Googlebot visiting your site more often, it's possible that you can see the results of your changes between the major updates faster.

3) Customers like new content! You want repeat customers? Give your customers an excuse to visit your site! Provide them with information that changes often enough so that they return just to see "what's up." Sometimes the "popular" SEO advice is ok too – the common advice to "write lots of good content" actually can make a positive difference – as long as you build all the additional content pages correctly.

In many cases, if you're close to your industry, you'll be able to provide this fresh content easily enough. But if you're not, you can always utilize Syndicated Content to freshen the content on your own site.

Here's what I mean…

There are a lot of industry specific news sources on the internet that welcome the Syndication of their Content on other sites. Basically, they want you to put their content on your site!

You can do this manually, or you can put an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed on your site that will automatically update your site with new content from a specific industry every time new content is available.

How 'bout that?!

Whatever you do to generate the new content, the fact of the matter is that changing the content on your site, especially when it's new to the search engines, can go a long way to getting your site indexed quickly and thoroughly.

Thanks for reading. Next time we'll talk about one of the biggest mistakes webmasters make that literally costs them tons of quality incoming links – and makes getting links way harder than it needs to be.

Johan Setiawan
http://InternetMarketer.SuccessUniversity.com