How Important is Updating?

Congratulations! You have a website! But that's not good enough... Updates are needed and should be done on a regular basis. If neglected, you will find people lose interest and so do the search engines. So how can you keep your site up to date?

Updating is a way of telling your visitors you care enough to keep them informed. Not only that, it's a way of telling the search engines you care enough to put current information out there. A huge bonus when you're trying to boost your search rankings!

There are several ways in which you can keep your website up to date. Most don't require much, if any knowledge of HTML coding or any other technical expertise. If you know how to work your keyboard and mouse, you should be able to up date your website. Let's go over several updating options.

Option number one is always having your web manager make updates for you. This option doesn't appeal to many because it usually takes two things a lot of us don't have: extra time and extra money! This option works fine for those who only make a few updates a year, but most of us should be updating more regularly than that!

There's always the good old editing programs. Adobe has Contribute, Microsoft has it's own programs and there are many more to choose from. You can spend as little or as much as you want on these programs. It all depends on what you want. Most make it fairly quick and easy to update, but you may need to install some extras to upload your changes to the website such as FTP programs. Definitely not something to be afraid of, but an extra step none the less.

Installing a blog on your website is another way to update. Wordpress Blogs are very common. They offer a lot of nice features and are fairly easy to use. The tricky part is getting them interfaced with your website layout. The best course of action here is to probably contact your website manager and discuss adding a blog so you can do your own updates.

These are just two common ways that are fairly simple and require little or no knowledge of HTML coding. Most of us (myself included) have very minimal understanding of HTML, so this is a very easy way to keep our visitors happy with current information, and keep boosting our rankings on the search engines!