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If you want visitors to return to your site and the search engines to love you, it is essential to keep your webpages updated. If you run lots of sites this can become quite a laborious and time consuming task, so you will want to find ways of automating this process.

One easy way of adding fresh, up to date content to your site is to use one or more RSS feeds. These look good added to the sidebar of a blog. An RSS feed brings news and posts from an external blog and displays them on your site. Choose one or more feeds related to the topic of your site. This has huge benefits for you and your readers. Each time a reader comes to your site they know they will see fresh, up to date content, and the content of these feeds added to your own content makes an interesting, information packed site that you visitors will want to return to.

Using RSS feeds you are often given the option of displaying headlines, part content or full post content. Using just headlines takes up less space, but encourages visitors to click and leave your site. Using full posts takes up more space, but ensures there is lots of fresh content for your visitors and the search engines to read.

Another advantage of using RSS feeds is that older content disappears from your site or blog. If you add content to your site manually, it will stay on the site unless you remove it. Blogs are designed so that newer content simply pushes older content further down the archive list. The content is not removed. Static websites need the page content to be edited and reuploaded for it to remain up to date. With an RSS feed you choose how many posts from the incoming blog are displayed. Usual choices are 5 - 15 posts. If the blog from the feed is being drawn is regularly updated then none of the content will remain on your site for very long.

Keep an eye out as you search the web for new, relevant RSS feeds to add to your site. This will ensure your content remains interesting, varied and up to date.

On a smaller scale there are many scripts you can install to keep dates and times up to date. This will reassure visitors that your site is current. There is nothing more depressing than finding an interesting site only to see that it was last updated two years ago and there are no newer dates displayed anywhere.

It needn't be hard work keeping your site up to date. Automate the process and your visitors will remain happy and you will not feel tied to your site.

Learn more about this author, Carol Smith.
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