Many people ask the question: Why update old content when I can write new content? New content is seen as important because Google sees your site growing, so it’s a great question. Now, remember that that time you bought organic food and it went bad a kajillion times faster than food with preservatives? That’s just like old content… it goes bad at a faster rate than you’d like (not to diss organic food, I love the stuff – I’m just a pig and eat it quickly).

Old content can be updated and the more substantial you update it, the more it will revitalize its freshness factor. This includes better rankings and the links on the page will fill up with more link juice to pass on to linked pages.

For additional reading, this SEOmoz article does an excellent job of explaining the benefits of updating old content.

Online marketing and SEO has come a long way. There are so many different activities you can do now to promote yours or your client’s site / product / event / service. It is very easy for SEO to be an addiction. I’m sure many of them look like addicts with the amount of over-promotion they do. I know this because it’s happened to some of my clients and myself.

Are you an SEO / marketing junkie? Here’s what you can do to recover:

Admit there’s a problem

You’re spending countless hours seeking dofollow backlinks to improve Pagerank and your spouse feels like your marriage is with the screen instead of him/her. Think of the situation objectively and try to find the thought chain in why you’re doing in what you’re doing. Here’s an example:

“I’m building great backlinks BECAUSE it will help my client’s business succeed BECAUSE that will lead to my success”

What is ‘success’ and will spending all day marketing it really further business? Is money success? Sure, it’s something that you need, but is the active notion of clicking the “send message” one extra time of so many times really going to further you in life?

Get back to the roots

Think about the fundamental practices and advice people say about SEO / marketing. Try not to get sidetracked from it with some unusual Digital-Pointesque easy-exposure concept.

Content is King and some solid, authentic, white-hat ways to promote it is the way to go. If people like the content on your blog, the concept of the product you’re selling, or your latest design work, they will spread the word through the hundreds of social apps we have now and your manpower will substantially increase. If you’re only one person promoting it and over time it still doesn’t pick up amongst a broad audience, maybe there’s something you should be doing differently. Change the content, write with a different style, or add a feature to the product that will benefit people.

The right mindset

A while back, I was constantly using StumbleUpon in hopes that I’d increase traffic. I realized I was missing the point…entirely. For example, do you enjoy tweeting away messages to people, or do you see it as a way to advertise your blog? Or both? These are both good examples of tools you can use to help share pages that you want to share, but if you’re using it FOR just getting traffic, you’re missing the point. I noticed that when honestly building relationships online, authentically communicating with people without the goal to promote my blog ends up being the people that help me the most – both personally and for business.

There are no loopholes

I worked for an SEO dude in Montreal at one point and he told me that there’s no easy ‘loopholes’ in SEO / marketing. There’s a cost to everything. I chose not to believe him. I believed that back in the day when SEO / online marketing started there may have not been an easy way, but with all this software helping SEO and marketing, there must be something out there that would easily promote my site. I realize it’s actually the opposite. It’s increasingly becoming harder to be found, search engines are a hell of a lot smarter, and the scammy software’s functionality barely helps. These “miracle traffic” programs are all scams. If you know a miracle IM technique that isn’t already popular, I would love to hear about it in the comments section.

Moderation is the key

Submit your new article to some news sites, digg it, and promote your awesome new web layout on some CSS showcases. Just don’t get caught up with going out of your way to harm people’s mental environments with your content. If it’s great stuff, people will do the work for you. Amen!

Google has decided to make some significant changes of it’s indexing engine.

At the beginning of 2009, Google already made a few changes to it’s search, putting greater importance on:

• Keywords in the URL
• Incoming Links
• Social Bookmarks
• New Content added to site
• Domain Age

With the release of Bing, Google decided to rewrite a large chunk of their indexing system, making it cleaner and have faster indexing. You can watch a video 0f Matt Cutts (with a newly owned bald head) talk about the latest update, code-named Caffeine. What’s the best part of it? You can already use Caffeine and see your ranking. Your placement won’t be too different from where it is currently, but could be a few ranks down or up. What should you do? Get your Caffeine rank up and above the competition because that’s what will matter in the near future. Well, here’s the link:

Go to Google Caffeine

Next off, there are rumors about Google starting to place weight on your breadcrumbs and display them in the SERPS. This is a helpful way to encourage people to name their FTP directories well.

How do you feel Google will do in in the future with the competition?