Old content is the kiss of death on Google. Search engines prioritize fresh content, presumably because currency is the currency of the Web. Yet, how often do companies throw up Web pages and leave them sitting there idle for one, two, five years at a time? Not only does stale content cause search engine visibility to plummet, it makes a terrible impression on human readers, who can usually sense when a company's website was an exercise in going through the motions, as opposed to a mission to energetically and authentically communicate.

Content creation for the Web isn't a project - it's a process.

Adding a business blog to your site is a stupendous way to ensure your site is getting healthy doses of fresh content, but even without a blog, there are many ways to get this job done.

1. Create a Media Room. Post newsworthy blurbs about your firm
2. Create an Employees page and rotate bios/human interest profiles in and out
3. Add a Featured Products or Featured Services section to your home page
4. Add a Deal of the Month section to your home page
5. Create an FAQ page - and actually update it
6. Rotate important/timely FAQs in and out of your home page as a "Question of the Month"
7. Add and Industry News section to your site and post excerpts from blog posts - you might generate some search engine optimizing back links in the process
8. Create pages that speak to current issues ...
   • How to survive the recession with our products/services
   • How we can help you get out of debt
   • How our products/services make more sense under current tax law
   • How our products/services make more sense with the Stimulus Package
9. Create a Case Studies section and keep adding to it - besides being great for SEO, case studies are persuasive
10. Create a Client Testimonials page and keep adding to it - also the perfect blend of SEO and persuasion

Not an exhaustive list by any means, but certainly enough to get you thinking. The key point I want to make is that all these suggestions are not only going to help raise your search engine rankings, they present information that customers want and need.

Also - implicit in these 10 fresh content suggestions is the notion that the content will change. Extremely important. A "Question of the Month" implies there will be a new question next month. "Deal of the Month" - same thing. A "Featured Product" or "Spotlight Employee" implies there will be a new product or new employee showcased at some point.

The danger here is to set something like this up and then forget about the updates. If your site displays the same Deal of the Month for three years running, visitors will roll their eyes instead of their cursors.

Bottom line -The more valuable your site is to human readers, the more likely they will be to return. Stale content has limited value at best. Fresh content is what online visitors expect and demand.