How To Update Your Blog Like a Lazy Ass

pagesscreensnapz001

This post was guest blogged by Richard Adams is the author of the definitive guide to finding a profitable niche online. Find out more at http://www.NicheMarketingWizard.com.

There has been much debate over the last few years about whether regularly updated websites actually rank higher in Google than others. The bloggers will try to convince you that because they are always adding new articles, Google gives them preference. Equally, some hardcore search engine marketing professionals point out that with constantly changing text on the homepage or your site, your rankings will also likely jump up and down depending on the content of the articles currently displayed?

So Who Is Right?

Well, while I think it’s impossible to give a definitive answer (and I have some websites with great rankings using both models) I do have a startling discovery to tell you about.

In December 2008 I was so busy running another business of mine that I completely forgot to update one of my blogs for a four week period. While others were auto-updating with content I had written in advance to go out during the month, I completely forgot this one site.

It is a small niche blog which receives around 100-150 visitors a day on average, 90% of which come from Google, and it is normally updated two or three times a week. Then of course I broke this cycle and I let it lay dormant for a four week period.

What happened really intrigued me. The graph, shown below, illustrates perfectly how the traffic numbers slowly dropped bit by bit until they were less than half of their original peak just weeks before.

pagesscreensnapz002

It’s important to note that everything else stayed pretty much constant. I lost no particularly important links, I didn’t do any link building etc. The only changes were the lack of posting (and of course the possibility of a small change to Google’s algorithm). None of my other dozens of niche blogs showed this pattern at all, suggesting the lack of updates was responsible for the drop.

Indeed, we can clearly see that visitor numbers started to drop significantly after about 2 weeks, dropping down to just 39 visitors by the end of December from an initial high of over 100. That’s over a 50% drop in traffic which I regard as sizable.

But even more interestingly, look what happened in early January when I started to post regularly to the blog again:

pagesscreensnapz003

Pretty amazing, wouldn’t you say? Not just a recovery, but we actually came back to an even higher level than before, and in a far shorter space of time!

To me, this beautifully illustrates the importance of updating and adding content to your website on a regular basis to help you achieve the most traffic possible from the search engines.

But How Can We Actually Implement That?

Of course the first technique is to set up your own blog. You can do this in a subdirectory of your main site so you would have www.yourdomain.com/blog or similar.

But if you’d rather not go to the trouble of creating your own blog there is something else you can do. And that is to add other people’s regularly updating content to your otherwise static site.

Many regularly updated websites – such as the popular news sites – publish their own RSS feed which you can add easily to a static website with minimal technical knowledge.

Here’s How To Do It

The first thing we need is some content that is going to be regularly updated. Yahoo News is a great source of such content. All we do is to type in the keyword that our website is targeting to gather all the latest news on that topic. On the results page, click the orange RSS button on the right-hand side and take note of the website address of the page.

pagesscreensnapz004

From there, we can go over to one of the free RSS-to-javascript services available online. Here are just a few options:

Possibly the simplest of these is RSS-Info.com. All we need to do is to paste the website address of your special Yahoo RSS news feed into the box, decide on a couple of basic options and then paste the HTML code we are given straight into our webpage.

pagesscreensnapz005

From then on, you will have constantly updated content on your site with none of the hassles and all the benefits. Enjoy!

*Editor’s CommentsWhile most blogs will not have a problems with you taking their headline and an except to display on your blog with a link back to the original post, they will have a major problem if you post their entire article on your blog, with a link or no link. I only recommend this method as nothing more than filler to round out your blog. Unique content is what drives traffic and the best unique content comes from you. – John Chow