No? Well it should be. An effective website should be updated regularly – at least weekly in an ideal world.

Most businesses invest a lot of time and energy in the initial creation of their website – whether it’s a shop window or active e-commerce site. However what they fail to do is refresh it on a regular basis. It’s important for a few reasons but mainly:

• To maintain interest and constant vitality to your website so it doesn’t become stale to repeat visitors. You can tell in an instant if a website that hasn’t been updated for a while
• To help Google (and the others) find you. The search engine ‘spiders’ love new content and your rankings will thank you for it.

Here are 5 top tips for updating your website:

• At the very least put your Twitter feed on your home page. If you seriously don’t have time to update your website content, at least your Tweets will show some activity. It won’t help your SEO (being found on search engines) but it is one way of brushing away the cobwebs on a daily basis. Note, however, that it isn’t very ‘current’ to have your Twitter feed on display and it will only have any effect at all if you Tweet regularly!
• Review your website words on a regular basis. Updating your homepage is a useful way of improving your SEO and interest levels. Take different sections of your site in turn and consider ways to attract interest. New images, interesting quotes and new information can all be easily incorporated.
• Consider incorporating a regularly changing section: ‘Tax Tip of the Week’ for example – this is a quick and easy way to update your website with changing content as well as showing your credibility.
• Include a page for news, blogs and downloads – this is where you and your team can be creative, showcasing individual skills and specialisms through informal, easy to read short articles. See our previous blog on the importance of blogging if you’re not convinced. We know of businesses who rely on the power of blogging to get them high enough business via Google searches to never have to do any advertising at all.
• Do your housekeeping – remove old news, take down events that have passed, trash old newsletters and keep an eye on dates and times you have referred to anywhere on the site.

There’s many more ideas of course – we’ll include more in future blogs. And remember that it is well worth investing in having someone in charge of your online presence – we can help if you need to know more.