Blog Updates
Having a blog is a useful tool in the SEO campaign, but using it to generate content is not enough for a site’s needs. It is critically important, in order to reach the full effect of your blog, to regularly update it. I use the term ‘regularly’ with a lot of emphasis here. It is not good enough to update it once or twice a week, you really need to be adding new content at least 4 or 5 times a week; more if possible.
The benefits of this can be seen by closely monitoring the time it takes for Google to index your blog entry. After a certain length of time of consistent daily updates, you will notice that Google will gradually increase the rate of indexing your site’s content. Just look on the search results to find your blog entry and it will tell you when that entry was included into Google’s index. Be sure to regularly update your sitemap to make sure that all your pages are included. I have found from personal experience that if you use a sitemap for long enough, then one day you leave out a certain page (like the main blog front page), then Google may actually de-index that page. For me it took a couple of weeks before I realised I had omitted the page from my sitemap. However, once I realised what had happened, I was able to put it back in and Google grabbed it again within days. So be careful with your sitemaps, they may have more impact that you are lead to believe.
With that said, daily updates to your blog will benefit your site’s rankings enormously and allow Google to both crawl faster and perhaps even give you extra points in the ranking algorithm. I know it is a pain to be creative every day with your blog, but it is probably well worth persevering for 6 months with this strategy and seeing if it pays off.