How Often Should You Add Content to Your Website?

There is an interesting forum discussion that's started over at Webmaster World on how often you should consider adding fresh content to your website.

Everyone should know by now that fresh content is important for any website - both for your visitors and for search engine optimization purposes. But how much content, and how often?

The topic is certainly open to debate and planning for regular content additions should be part of your web strategy. The discussion started when the operator of an ecommerce site wanted to know if adding five new articles at a time made any difference from a search engine's point of view than adding them one at a time. Responses vary on which is more effective - adding the content one piece at a time on a regular basis, such as daily, or adding 5 pieces of new web content once per week.

I don't think it makes very much difference in terms of search optimization and whether it matters to visitors depends on how often the average visitor comes to the site. Those looking for something new every day would of course be more attracted to daily posting of fresh content, even if it's only a short blog post. For optimizaiton purposes you wouldn't want to add 100 pieces at once unless you were just building out a new site. Search engines look for "natural" growth, and I don't think it takes an argument to consider that 100 new articles at once isn't "natural".

What is important is placing links to the new content on a page within the website that gets spidered frequently by the search engines, and most agree that new content benefits from being linked to from the home page as well as from the HTML sitemap. And don't forget to add the new URL to the XML sitemap, too.