It seems like every few months we have to cover, once again, the same old topics and rumors about search engine optimization. And like before, the answers are going to be the same. There are no secrets. There are no special tricks that aren't widely known and utilized in every category already. And nobody has an inside track to Google. Not even Google people have an inside track to Google.

The side effects of a recent website makeover by Empro make evidently clear how important it is to keep your website up to date, and how important it is now to keep doing that all the time. If you depend on your website for business, you know how important it is to keep your site ranked well so that you can be found. If you are like the typical client of ours, you know you should pay attention to this, but probably don't do it as often as you should.

A few months ago, Google rolled out it's Caffeine SE model ranking websites. This new model placed much more importance on the currency of content as part of the SEO evaluation. Newer content meant much more than every before, and frequent content updates also became important. This was in response to the plethora of new and popular social media outlets, as well as the proliferation of blogs, forums and tweets as sources of new content. Google saw that being  up-to-date was becoming for more important, so their algorithms now reflect that belief.

Okay, maybe that's a little extreme. But not much. If you look at the criteria that most of the better search engines look at when evaluating content, way up on the list is "content uniqueness".

What they, meaning Google, is looking for is content that is both compelling and real. One way they evaluate the realness of a document is by who unique the content is. Are there copies of it elsewhere on the web? Does it look vastly similar to other documents? Or is there even a pattern to the documents on your own site? Are you yourself repeating this document with only one or a few words changed?

Ask your client, which social network is more popular, Facebook's or McDonald's? They will probably answer "I didn't know that McDonald's offered social networking", and make the point for you. You simply don't go to the hardware store for oranges. Therefore it is best to concentrate on building a compelling website for whatever it is your client specializes in. Adding features from popular sites wont help, but communicating well and creating real value for visitors will.