How often should you be blogging? What does it matter whether you write today or not? What factors determine your blogging frequency?

I suppose that blogging updates actually break down into two parts – updating your blog with new posts and updating your blog as part of its general maintenance. Whilst the second part is probably the one that is most forgotten, it is the easiest to talk about and can be very beneficial, so I’ll start there.

Maintenance Updates
Running some simple maintenance updates on your blog can be highly beneficial. By doing so you can maintain more of your visitors for longer, which increases your page hits and your overall visitor levels and experience.

So it is well worth looking at some of your most popular posts at least once per month. Just go over them and make sure that they are linking out to other relevant posts. Keep an eye on the new posts – can they linked to from the most posts? By concentrating on the popular posts and working through the list you hit the posts most likely to make an impact. As you become happy with all of them work through the list.

New Posts
For some blogs how often you are posting is dictated by the content. If you are blogging about news or current affairs, then as and when things happen you will be posting. But, what about informational blogs?

Many of these will not actually have a great wealth of new information coming up once they have existed for years and it might be tempting to leave them static, but that is a big mistake for two reasons – first, the search engines get fed up of your blog not producing new material and second, your readers do not have an incentive to keep coming back.

The Plan Is Formed
So that is our plan – we want to update our blogs often enough to interest both our visitors and search engines. At the very least this generally means a weekly update. This is frequent enough to keep the search engines interested and readers will see a slow stream of new materials.

On the other hand, we could update several times every day. Is that a good idea? I actually think that unless your blog is aimed at news and events that are appearing daily, this could be information overload. You might notice that Google will appear as soon as you first post each day, then not come running for every additional post, not until the next day.

This is a sign that Google seems to like at most daily updates, unless you have a very popular website. So somewhere between a low of weekly updates and a high of daily updates is about right. Exactly where that is lies is up to you and how much you can handle.