For several years now, our good friend Russ Henneberry has been preaching to small business owners about the importance of content marketing. Good content, updated regularly, is a terrific way to get more traffic and become a subject matter expert in your industry.
This past week, Google introduced a new ‘Freshness Update’ to the SERPs – and it has changed some things for business owners. Suddenly, fresh content is more of a contributing factor in how your site is ranked and displayed on Google. Just as Russ has been saying for several years, it’s more important now then ever to blog for your business.
How the Freshness Update Works
Affecting about 35% of searches, the freshness update takes into account the ‘latest news’ about different searches. For example, a search today for ‘Bob Forsch’ shows not just information about him, but also links to various blogs and articles written today.
At this time, it appears that the data for ‘fresh’ posts is being pulled from RSS feeds, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it also takes into account the amount of mentions in various social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook.
Check out this video from SEOMoz about the freshness update: