Want Better SEO? Become a Content Publisher

One of the most effective ways I know to boost your search engine traffic is to commit to regularly publishing new content on your website. For some companies that might mean a couple of new pages per month, for others it might mean a couple of pages per week, and for some, even a couple of pages per day. For most clients I work with, I ask them to commit to a minimum of one new quality web page per week. That’s also about what we do here at Juicy Results.

Why Publishing More Means Ranking More

Google designed their crawling robots and search algorithms around what they felt the best websites at that time were—that list included newspapers, media outlets and trade groups. Spend a little time searching, and you will find that Google tends to rank content from media outlets, newspapers, magazines, journals and popular blogs more often than websites that do not publish very often.

Let me share why I believe Google ranks content from websites that publish frequently over sites that do not.

The argument might be made that since these websites employ a team of professionals whose sole job is to regularly publish content, there is a strong chance that their content is original and high quality (which is what Google wants to rank). Reverse engineering that assumption and one can make the case that there may be a ranking factor that rewards websites that publish consistently and frequently.

One might also assume that a website that publishes often is well maintained, and also more likely to keep other content up-to-date, making an argument for continuing to rank older content on that same website.

If you don’t like those arguments, there is also the number of patents that Google has filed and announcements from them like this about how the freshness is scored and used in search algorithms.

My last argument for publishing more is that more content simply gives you more opportunities to rank. Remember, modern search engine optimization is not about getting your home page to the top of the results for lots of keywords, but about optimizing every single page of your website to rank for the most relevant keywords. By simple math, a 200 page website has more rankings than a 20 page website.  As you develop strong SEO habits and a work rhythm, you will want to expand your keyword targeting a little each time you win new rankings, and new content is the kindling you use to get the fire started for those new targets.

So, there you go. If you want more search engine rankings, become a content publisher.

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This blog post was adapted from The Bootstrapper’s Guide to SEO.