Update Your Website Quickly and Often

Sometimes change is like a large ship turning in the night, slowly moving toward a new direction seemingly inches at a time while the passengers on board don’t even feel the motion and the ripples in the water are slight. But come morning, the ship is facing in a new direction and moving forward at an accelerated rate.

That is the image that comes to my mind when thinking about search engine optimization these days. There are a lot of companies fast asleep below deck in their cabins. Before you could hire a SEO company to do some code abracadabra and in short order you were coming out on top in SERP (search engine results page).

No more, my friends and colleagues. No more.

The last few updates, and the really big one named Panda, were focused on original and quality content.

This latest update, affectionately nicknamed Freshness, is a solid indication as to where Google search is going. Search results are going to be based on the author’s authority and the recency of the information, as well as taking their cue from a website’s timestamps and social signals, such as how many times has that page been read, shared, commented on, and how many links has it gathered.

If you haven’t started to engage in content marketing, haven’t created and aren’t sustaining a blog, and aren’t getting active in social media with some focused content marketing, this recent update should be the loud bell clanging of a wake up call.

Calling on an SEO company to perform code magic isn’t going to be of much help moving forward, especially not if search continues in this direction. SEO companies of the future will need to be content marketers and social media masters more so than code mavens and abracadabra experts. (Please know that I mean no insult to SEO folks out there—really I don’t—some of you provide a fantastic service and are reputable firms and a ton of these folks are a heck of a lot smarter than I am.)

One more thing I would like to point out. I know you might not want to get involved with Google+ just yet. You might feel overwhelmed as it is and you haven’t even gotten up and running with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, so Google+ seems like overload. Well, now you have to. That’s right—you have to.

I mean really, if Google is going to look for social signals, where exactly do you think they are going to look first? So if I seem somewhat absent on Facebook and Twitter in the coming months, then come and hook up with me on Google+ because I think I need to practice what I’m preaching. I won’t abandon my places on Twitter and Facebook but I am going to start working on Google+.

And if Google is looking for Fresh content, can you think of any better way to meet that challenge on your website than by blogging? If you have been putting blogging off for sometime in the future when you have more time, then push it up on the priority list. If you can’t get to it then please find someone in house or outsource to at least get you started.

SEOmoz did a great job explaining this latest update if you would like to read more and watch a short, easy to follow video, click here.