Updating your website: a simple way to add fresh web content

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Gary Chow | No Comments » | Trackback URL

Nowadays, most businesses have a website. Some companies may have revamped or built new websites three of more times since the first one.

So the question isn’t ‘do you have a website?’ but ‘how good is your website?’

But what is a ‘good’ website?

One that has flashy visual appearance? One that has high resolution, high-impact images? One with creative videos? One that has won design awards?

The answer might well be ‘yes’ to all of the above

But for me, a good website is one that has high quality content. Content that is meaningful, engaging, motivating and fresh.

This leads us to a very important question: when was the last time you updated your website content?

Fact is many websites have content that have not been updated regularly. Some have content untouched for months, even a year!

In a busy world, that’s not surprising. It takes time and effort in updating web content. And with so much going on, it’s so easy to simply ‘set and forget’.

What’s more, as a business person chances are you’d much rather focus on doing what you do best – running your business, working with clients and selling what you make  – than sitting in front of your computer typing out words and uploading files, especially when this type of work is non-billable.

But content management – as with marketing – is far too important to ignore. If your website is unchanged for weeks and months, that’s like going on a date wearing the same outfit everytime. You simply won’t impress.

So to ensure your website content is fresh and topical, I’d suggest you put together a content management plan.

It doesn’t have to be high-tech, you can simply use a manilla folder as the key tool.

Into this folder, put relevant material that come by your desk everyday. Things you’d like to share with your customers and target audience. It should of course include material that they’d find interesting and meaningful to them and not just information marketing your business. To help you determine what would be interesting to a reader, just put yourself in their shoes and ask the question ‘what’s in it for me?’

Share the knowledge you already have. This could include reports your company has published, papers your staff members have presented at conferences, video presentations on products, photos of jobs you have worked on, testimonial from clients, reports published elsewhere, articles you have written, articles from other websites or journals, reviews of book on your subject area, YouTube clips…and so on.

Then once a week (or more) go through your folder and identify what can be shared on your site. But before you upload the item, make sure you adapt it for the web. This means rewriting articles, formatting videos and creating suitable tabs and information categories on your site to accommodate the new content.

Having a blog on your site is an easy and effective way to provide fresh content – just like I am doing now.

Further, if you have a newsletter, you can send the newsletter out via your site which can include snippets of your new content with links back to your site. Now, not only are you sharing new information, you’re also building traffic to your site. Remember too that having more content ensures you can embed more keywords into your site and that too will increase traffic through higher search rankings.