If you have been a webmaster for more than a week, you've surely heard the saying "Content Is King". And it really is true! This article will explain why the regular addition of fresh content to your website is so crucial and explain several ways to do it easily and inexpensively (even free).

Why Adding Fresh Content Regularly Is So Important

Adding new content to your website on a regular basis is the key to your online success for several reasons:

1 - The search engine spiders LOVE to crawl new pages. Their is intense competition in the quest to be considered "the best" overall search engine, and the total quantity of pages in their index is an important bragging right for the winner. Believe me, if you'll invest the time required to add new high-quality informational articles to your website on a regular basis, Google and the other search engines will reward you very well for it!

2 - Adding fresh content to your site on a regular basis (every day, if possible) keeps Google's spider "interested" in your site. Once it realizes that you add at least one new page every day, it will visit your site and crawl your your pages more frequently. Your new pages will get crawled, indexed and begin showing up in searches in days instead of weeks!

3 - More quality content is good for attracting more visitors to your website. Why? It's a numbers game - if your site has 1,000 pages indexed in the search engines, that means there are 1,000 "roads" to your site from the search results. Your site will have a greater chance of being "found" on the search engines for a whole slew of search terms than if you had only, say, 50 pages.

Note that I said QUALITY content. Don't just put up junk - believe me, the search engines and your visitors alike will hate junk.

4 - More content attracts more one-way inbound links, which in turn boosts your search engine rankings. Gaining lots of links to lots of pages will help boost the status of your website in the "eyes" of Google, Yahoo, etc. and your pages will rank higher for their search terms.

So how do I go about continuously adding new content to my website?

There are many easy ways to add great quality content to your site, even on a daily basis. Here are just a few that work very well for me:

1 - Write articles. Simply do a Google search on topics related to your website's theme, read the information you find, then write an article about what you have read. DO NOT copy another site's articles without the owner's express permission. Doing so is "copyright infringement", and it will cause you more trouble than you can even imagine! Simple 4-step process: Search > Read > Understand > Write!

2 - Hire others to write articles for you if you don't have the time, ability or desire to write them yourself. College students are often more than capable and willing to write great articles for $10 - $15 a pop. Check with your local community college or post an ad in the classified section of your local newspaper.

3 - Solicit article submissions from other webmasters in exchange for a link back to their sites. Reprinting interesting articles is a tradition in the publishing industry, and if you do it the right way it can work for you too. The key is avoiding a duplicate content penalty from the search engines by having a significant amount of other text on the page in addition to the article text. Navigation links, header and footer information, etc. all help make a page different from others on the web.

4 - Visit the many "Free Content" websites that are easily found on the Internet. There are literally thousands of great articles already written that are free for the taking in exchange for a simple link back to the author's website (usually in a 4 or 5 line "resource box" tacked on to the end of the article). Simply do a Google search for "free content".

Important: Observe the "no junk" rule stated above. You want your website to be seen as an asset to the web, not an eyesore. Besides, it does no good whatsoever to get visitors to your site just to have them hit the Back button once they see the page!

Rick Rouse is the owner of RLROUSE Directory & Informational Resources http://www.rlrouse.com, your one-stop resource for interesting and useful information on virtually any topic. Visit his SEO Blog at http://www.rlrouse.com/blog/ for lots of great site promotion and traffic-building articles.