Why Fresh Content is Necessary for Successful Website Optimization

The importance of fresh content in boosting website speed optimization cannot be overstated. Since 2003, when Google first filed a patent to score content based on its freshness, the degree of freshness of a piece of web content has become a key search engine ranking factor. Google scores web content based on its freshness, a trend that continues to shape the road-map of the path the search giant intends to take for many years to come.

The latest Google updates have made fresh content even more important for website optimization. One of these recent algorithmic updates is the Freshness Update. This update places greater emphasis on the ability to return fresher content for specific queries. This update has meant that Google scores all of your web pages for freshness and ranks your website accordingly.

But, because different keyword searches have different freshness needs, the search engine scores each webpage according to the specific type of search query. So if you have hyper-fresh web content, you’ll receive higher ranking for those queries that require fresh content. Google will still use your old web content for other searches, but its bias toward fresh content is clearly evident. The types of queries that typically require fresh content include recent events, hot news or topics, regularly recurring events, and frequent updates.

How the Freshness of Your Web Content Affects Your Ranking
Inception date. Google gives a "freshness score” to a piece of web content on its inception date, the date when Google’s web crawling bot first indexes the document. This freshness score significantly reduces as the content becomes older, and you must add fresher content to boost and maintain your rankings.

Document changes. In addition to the age of web pages or domain, Google scores regularly update web content for freshness differently from static pages (content that doesn’t change). This means that the amount of web content change on your website or blog plays a role, with bigger changes to the body text delivering a bigger impact in terms of freshness score compared to smaller changes.

Rate of web content change. How often changes are made to a webpage can impact freshness. A blog that’s updated regularly is given a higher freshness score than web pages whose content remain static over time. So, a higher rate of web content change can have a positive impact on freshness score.

New page creation. Websites and blogs that add new documents more frequently are more likely to earn a higher freshness score on Google compared to sites which add new documents at a slower rate. To improve your website optimization, you need to add new pages with fresh, relevant content to your site.

Value of the content. Changes made to the important parts of web content signal a higher level of freshness than changes made to those less important areas of a webpage. The main body of text is usually the most important area of a web page, while ads, navigation, and addresses are considered to be less important.

User behavior. Fresh, engaging content attracts traffic and can increase your website’s "stickiness”. But when your content becomes outdated, users are going to avoid your website, and those who happen to visit will spend much less time on it. Google will notice these behavior metrics and rank you accordingly.

Useful Tips to Keep Your Web Content Engaging and Fresh
To improve your website optimization and achieve success online, you have to regularly add fresh content that informs, educates, and entertains. Try focusing on human interest. People are always interested in the latest news, sports, polls, and pop culture conversations. Doing creative and well-thought-out news and pop culture tie-ins and providing useful information that includes recent statistics and case studies will help keep your content fresh, interesting, and engaging to boost traffic and increase your website speed optimization.

Think of ways to tie in pop culture with a popular topic in your industry. Breaking pop culture news can give you valuable material to create juicy, click-able, keyword-delicious content to draw in traffic. You could also capitalize on trending news stories by tying in your business, products, or expertise to hot topics or trends.

Other types of posts to drive more traffic to your blog include case studies, stats, reports, personal stories, breaking news, weekly or daily roundups, how-tos and tutorials, resources or link lists, checklists, reviews, controversial posts, infographics, interviews, guest posts… the list goes on. There is no shortage of topics to fit your content and editorial goals. Free your creativity and come up with valuable, fresh and engaging content for your prospects and existing customers.

Get expert help developing fresh content: contact Website Optimization today.

Website Optimization
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