It’s common knowledge in the SEO industry that “content is King.” More content, after all, means more opportunity for visitors, more attention from the search engines, and more pages that might be linked or shared virally by your visitors. However, it’s difficult to strike a balance in update frequency. In simple terms: how often should you update your site’s content?

The General Rule: More is Better

As a rule of thumb, the more often you update your site, the more content you add, the better off you will be. However, this can be taken to an extreme. You could easily have a team of fifty writers spending twelve hours a day writing content, and you would get some benefit out of every bit of it. There comes a point where you breach into “diminishing returns,” and no longer get much out of the new content you provide. However, there is no point at which frequent updates will hurt you, and you will gain at least a little benefit from any content update.

What’s the Minimum?

One of the great advantages to adding content is that there is more content to be displayed by the search engines. This will result in more “incidental keyword targeting,” where someone happens to type in a phrase that you used, word-for-word, in your most recent update. However, this isn’t the only benefit. Search engines will view your site as more or less valuable partially dependent on how often you update. As far as this aspect is concerned, there is a limit to the benefit you can gain.

If you want to convince the search engines that you are a frequent updater, you will want to update you site at least once a week. Any more than this is unnecessary to accomplish the goal. Lower frequency than once a week will show the search engines some degree of stagnancy, and can reduce your rank on the search engines.

The simple summary is this: For best results, update your site at least once a week. Anything you do beyond that, however, is still beneficial.