Search engine spiders are perhaps the closest thing to a virtual life form the planet has every seen. Racing around on fiber cables like the electrical impulses in your brain, recording everything they see, these systems behave very similarly to the way we think.
Think of the websites that you visit the most often, ones that you went to once and just new you’d want to visit again and so you added it to your favorites. What was it about these sites that made you want to go back. Generally speaking the sites that are most revisited are those with varying content of interest to the visitor. Personalized news sites make very popular homepages. Why? Because you will get new information of interest to you every day. But what if they stopped providing new information? You might keep it as your home page for a few days but after a while you’d stop going back. Search engines act the same, the more frequently you add new content, the more frequently they will visit your website.
Making changes two your website will serve two main functions:
1. Repeat visitors – assuming that you have a well designed site with useful content, periodically updating your website will give visitors a reason to return. Perhaps not on your site the frequency with which it is updated. Or allow people to subscribe for updates when new information is added.
2. Repeat visits from the search engines – the more often you make changes to your website the more often the search engines will spider your site. This is important for a couple reasons. First, if you make changes often you will have more content and fresher content to rank well for. This means that you will be able to rank well for a larger variety of terms and also rank for phrases that are current. Another big advantage to frequent spidering is that when the search engines change their algorithms (and they will) and if your site drops a bit in the rankings, you will have the search engines visiting often and thus, and changes you make to your site to counter these drops will be picked up much faster.
The more pages you can rank your site well for the better. The continuous addition of fresh content will help you rank for a larger number of terms and also help you rank higher for your focused search terms.
The more frequently your site gets spidered the faster you will be able to react to changes in the search engine rankings. Any day you are in a reduced position is costing you money. The faster you can react the faster you can get your rankings back the more money you will make.
So feed the spider. Add weekly articles, add a blog, add specials, add anything useful. Just keep your content fresh and they will come.