Dentists tell me they hear how updated content is needed to keep their websites ranked well in the search engines. They ask if I will be the one who will write the content to update their sites with fresh material daily, weekly, or monthly.

Every time I hear this I think, oh boy, here we go again. Apparently this myth of ‘necessity’ was started on the Internet in some forum or blog long ago by a now forgotten armchair webmaster. It’s now repeated like an old mantra of faith-based SEO.

To be sure, the efficacy of search engine optimization for a dentist website is partially dependent upon well-written textual content. So yes — don’t misunderstand — text and content are important.

What About Positions?
If you update page content regularly, will this help ensure your dental website stays at, or near the top of the search results? In a word, no. For the majority of websites and the varied industries they target, fresh daily content isn’t going to improve a static page’s ranking anymore than the old search engine submission scam. Dental websites are no different.

Shouldn’t You Just Do Something?
The premise of constantly updating text and content in order to competitively rank on Google is overrated, incorrectly applied and the claim is often used only to bedazzle or lure business owners who are naive about SEO into a recurring payment model. Without firsthand knowledge of SEO, without keyword research and without a positioning strategy, simply shifting words around, or adding more of them to a page is at best only a miscalculated, haphazard method to improve positions.

Are You In A Hurry?
Will freshly written content on a dental website cause it to jump to the top of the SERPS? That depends; if you already have a well-positioned site and you also have a properly configured Wordpress blog attached, you might be able to rank a dentistry oriented post on Google’s first page in 10 minutes or less. Then, same as with any other file, its ranking will re-adjust to conform with the same algorithm that all other sites and pages on the Web must satisfy.

Is This Stuff Magic?
Does tweaking content, or spicing pages correctly with SEO help ranking? Of course; though as you may know, SEO is much more than just on-page text, titles, metas, alt text and heading tags. In addition to these attributes, every page on every website is rewarded search engine positions according to the site’s navigation, inbound links, online tenure, industry association, page load speeds, bounce rates and a host of other factors.

What The Heck’s It Good For Then?
What sort of website benefits from fresh, updated content? NEWS SITES!!! Nothing stinks like old news; thus the need for fresh new stories, e.g. frequently updated content. Search engine spiders such as Google’s are always on the prowl for the freshest material; especially those websites which command either wide public appeal, or a popular niche theme, so long as it meets specific criteria. New content updated often is crawled more frequently.

But My Site’s Special, Isn’t It?
Regardless of how great a dental website is ranked, or how competitive its target market, dental sites will rarely get more than 50 visitors per day and certainly NEVER the thousands of daily visits a news site receives. Unless you’re building a website, editing pages, or conducting an SEO campaign, updating your dental site’s content often is pretty much useless. In fact, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can hurt you.

To Conclude…
For the dentist who is interested, I can show them any number of dental websites positioned on page one of Google for years in populations exceeding millions; and we’ve never updated page content.

As for the mythological axiom of constantly-updated content needed to affect dentistry website rankings in the search engines, let’s hope this tired old mantra of misinformation quickly finds its way to the trashbin of obscurity — where it belongs.

For The Visible Dentist, I’m John Barremore

This entry posted Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 10:15 pm - Filed under Good Copy Writing, Search Engine Optimization. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.