It’s often asked of me, “How do I get my website to be #1 in search results?” Now if you’re any bit of a techie, I can tell you all about how the internet is evolving at a breakneck pace thanks in part to mobile devices, social media and shifts in how we interact online.  But if we cut to the chase, I’m going to have to break it to you that unfortunately there is no magic code that will instantly and effortlessly catapult your website straight to the top (read: you need to work at it). More recently search engines have started to reward websites that are updated frequently and with good quality content.

“Simple! I can do that!” Wait…what’s the catch? For most of us, finding the time to write a blog post or update our website is not as easy as it seems. The truth is that when we’re busy, we simply don’t want to set aside time to come up with something witty yet relevant to our business. Or maybe we don’t fancy ourselves as good writers and publishing a regular blog is a daunting task. I’ve had clients in the past “copy ‘n paste” an entire article and publish it. Sure, it gets content on your blog quickly. But it’s illegal. Oh yeah, and the search engines are smart enough to realize who published the article first. Tsk, tsk.

Perhaps the easiest way to update your blog is to write a short post like I’m currently demonstrating and link to a quality article that someone else spent a good deal of time writing. To illustrate my example, check out this informative article Social Fresh wrote on “How To Use Content From Other Blogs Without Violating Copyright”. You see, the link gives credit to the true author, but all this commentary above is original content. Website = updated.