Want to have returning visitors? Update the content often

[dojo]

I can't count the times I heard or said it myself: "content is king". Good quality content, original ideas and a pleasant way to put down the words. This makes people come to your site and recommend it to other people too. With a keyword rich content you can also drive traffic from the search engines, thus having a steady flow of first time visitors.

We are not focusing on them right now, although the trick you are about to learn will also help with SEO, thus keeping the "new" visitors coming to the site.

Your content is indeed important ... lots of it .. and updated. Having a steady flow of new articles and ideas can realy make the difference in your site's promotion and success. When you start a new site you do it on a certain topic you are knowledgeable of. Some like webmaster related information, others music, movies, cars ... No matter what topic you wish to use in order to start a site, it's known that you must have some information about it (or be interested in it in order to learn more).

So you put down some articles in order to make the site ready to launch. Some use 10 articles, others put tens of them in few days, thus creating a good collection of them so that the visitors and the search engines have what to look for.

After the initial article writing, you need to keep the information coming steadily ... and this is the secret in order to have people come back to your site. Should you have 100 articles in your site, they will keep your first time visitors busy for some days .. but after finishing them all they'll need more. Your "normal" visitor, will check back from time to time in order to see if there are any new updates as content is concerned. After some weeks with no new articles, they might think the site is "dead" and you could lose them.

So .. UPDATE your content from time to time. Your visitors will know you can always give them something new to read, not to mention the search engines will "smell" new content and act accordingly. So, the secret is not just to have some articles on a site, but to keep your visitors interested in your good topics by getting them used to your updated content.

How often should you update?

This is indeed a tricky question. Can you update daily? That would be indeed great, but it also means you will get a "full time" job as an article writer. Let's be honest .. it's hard to keep the content fresh at this rate (unless you are having a blog and a lot of time on your hands to dedicate it to the writing "job"). For a webmaster related site (as this one is), writing daily articles is almost impossible, especially when we are talking about an unique article writer.

Try to see how often you can update the content in your site (7 articles in a month? More? Less?). And try to deliver them at a steady rate. I used to write 2-3 articles in a day (was inspired sometimes) and then have 1 month of nothing new on the site. I doubt my article writing spree from time to time could make too much in order to help with SEO and having visitors think this is a "healthy" site. So, I discovered it's better to have a well determined way of delivering content. I noticed that delivering 1 article every week can be better than putting 4 new articles in a day and then have a hiatus of 1 month. One article at a time makes it easier for me to promote it and visitors to notice it and read. The constant flow of information is helping them discover new things every few days and keeps the search engines pleased when seeing new content added.

And, before we end, don't forget to announce the new article .. in the first page for instance. Your visitors need time to learn your site and some might not notice the new addition. So, make sure they see it.