Why is fresh copy so important to my website?

MoreVisibility - February 22, 2007

Ok, You’ve set up a logical link system that’s easy to navigate, you’ve taken the time to make sure that you are not using frames for your site, you’ve ensured that you have a robots.txt file set up properly, you’ve used alt tags to describe your images and links and you’ve optimized your meta keywords, titles and descriptions. Now what?

Lets talk about copy, come on, we’ve all heard it, copy is king. But what does that mean? The fact is that copy is what helps distinguish you as an expert in your field, any field, if what you’re saying is relevant to your topic and informative to your website visitors. I know what you’re thinking, “I’ve had informative copy on my site for a long time and it is relevant to my field, why should I change it when it’s bringing in pretty good results”? You shouldn’t.

Let me put it like this, there are a couple of different crawlers that visit your site. I’m talking about two in particular “fresh-bots” and “deep crawl bots”. “Deep crawlers” do an in depth search of your site, indexing of all the pages. If after a couple of visits, they realize that the site doesn’t change much, they may not visit as often. If, on the other hand, you have frequently updated copy, such as a blog or a newsletter, the engines will send in the “fresh-bot” to do a quick scan of your surface pages for new content in between “deep crawls”. The “fresh-bots” will visit more often, but will not go into some of your deeper or older content.

Ideally, you want to have copy that is fresh and updated frequently, and copy about the tried and true long standing issues in your particular field. Also, by having copy that is frequently updated, you create yourself as a source for information, an expert in your field, and people will link to you. Both The fresh copy and the links it generates are vital components of the ranking system used by search engines.