Content creation and search engine optimization are two very important facets of digital marketing. These two are significantly interrelated. SEO without quality content is meaningless and so is content without SEO. Search Engine spiders look for content quality and qualify content which meets the standards. So, if you are a digital marketer, who wishes to improve your search engine rank, your SEO must be based on content quality.

A search engine algorithm determines content quality according to a number of factors such as the use of keywords, freshness of content, relevance of content, engagement rate and the like. Freshness of content is an important factor to earn good scores from a search engine algorithm.

Freshness as a Rank influencer:

Freshness has been a long standing factor for Google ranking. Google engineers have worked on to provide a roadmap for Google algorithm’s in the future and what is the role of freshness in it. The freshness score for a particular topic is also dependent on the nature of the topic.

The Google expert Amit Singhal once said “Different searches have different freshness needs.” The freshness score you earn for your content depend on what kind of queries you receive. The content types which usually need frequent fresh content area:

• Recent events or hot topics: “occupy oakland protest” “nba lockout”

• Regularly recurring events: “NFL scores” “dancing with the stars” “exxon earnings”

• Frequent updates: “best slr cameras” “subaru impreza reviews”

Whether a topic is regularly recurring or recently trending, it is determined by google in terms of social volume, media coverage and social media trend score for the respective topic.

Some of the important factors which are used by google algorithms to determine freshness are as follows:

Freshness as per inception date:

The freshness score for a piece of content decays over time. The inception date is an important factor that google takes into account while rating the freshness of the content. The inception date is the date when, Google first becomes aware of the document and Googlebot indexes the document and discovers a link to it.

Quality change matters for freshness:

A change in an unimportant sentence does not refresh your content as much as a large change in the body of the content. If you update links in your website, the other sentences relevant to that link must also be updated to improve the freshness score.

Refresh the core of your content:

Refresh the core of your content by changing content in the main body. Changes in sidebar including links in sidebar, footer copy doe not matter much to enhance freshness.

Frequency of updating:

Frequency of updating is another factor for measuring score of freshness. Frequency of updating depends on what your content is all about. For instance, if you have a news website, it needs a daily update and if it is a technology service website, even a monthly update may be sufficient.

New pages improve your freshness score:

The freshness score of your website will increase if you add an entirely new page rather than improvising on your old page.

Fresh Links from fresh websites improve the freshness score:

The freshness score of a website is even influenced by the freshness score of the other websites linking to it. So, earning new links from fresh websites improve the freshness score of a website. So, earn new links from new websites high on freshness score. Earning links in a steady manner rather than earning links which are irrelevant. Earning new links increases freshness score but at the same time, the links must be relevant and from quality websites.

So, updating content is a quality oriented process and it must be done regularly. Yet updating is often a tedious process. Ensuring quality updating is easily achievable when you take the help of your assistant. For content refreshing, your assistant must have some knowledge of both content and SEO. So outsourcing such work of updating to a Virtual Assistant may be a good option.