Keeping website content fresh 'will improve search engine optimisation'

15:00 4th January 2010

Firms hoping to improve their rankings as part of search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns should make sure that they update their website as regularly as possible.

This is according to Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch, who said that forthcoming improvements to Google in the form of search index algorithms (codenamed Caffeine) mean that more searches will become real-time.

As a result, companies which communicate with potential customers via social media portals like Facebook and Twitter - or which regularly provide relevant news on landing pages - may see improvements to their Google rankings.

"Websites that do lose rankings are likely to be relying on older, archived content that's not been updated in years. Keeping your site fresh to be crawled by Caffeine will be important," Mr Schonfeld said.

The expert added that most users will not notice changes to Google following the launch of Caffeine later in January, although search results may be provided faster and in a more "newsy" way.

Search Engine Journal correspondent Dave Erickson Fuentes recently urged marketers to become active on social media portals in order to boost SEO campaigns, since postings from Twitter and other sites are becoming more prominent in searches.

Facebook recently overtook Google as the most visited website in the US over Christmas.