September 1, 2017

When discussing websites, static and dynamic are two terms used which can be in reference to one of two things: either the code source from which the site content is pulled and/or the frequency with which the content is updated.  So basically, is there a content management system or database holding content, or is it within the HTML code?  Often times, unless you have a paid webmaster and have allotted personal or staff time to develop new content, the frequency of freshening website content is a direct result of the nature of the code source.  So, in English, if a site has content stored in a database, making it possible for content to vary on a page based on the info you are looking for, then it’s dynamic because it changes.  It’s not staying still.  If it doesn’t and you have to go into the code to do it then it’s fairly unmoving content, or static.

There are a lot of reasons that dynamic content  – so content that changes frequently – is better.

GOOGLE AND SEO
Google spends a lot of time defining what it is that makes good content.  It used to be that good content was defined by how many sites linked to you.  It didn’t matter whether what the sites were or who owned them.  This meant that you could buy a million domains and link them back to your site and it all caused you to win the game of getting on top.  Even more than that, SEO experts spent a lot of time putting specific content on a website and then lots of time building links back to that website.  Static, unchanging content, was fairly key.

It is now the exact opposite.  What Google realized is that they weren’t bringing people to quality content, but to the best spun and marketed content.  Quality information, however, changes.  So a site that stays the same and isn’t updated or added to, that isn’t dynamic, isn’t quality.  Google figures out quality content a few ways, but the piece of the algorithm that is most specific to dynamic content is Google site indexing.  Google doesn’t index your site once.  It indexes it all the time.  More than that it remembers if the current content has changed at all from the last time.  That means the content within a page as well as the number of pages on a site.  So regular site content updates need to be easy to do and then actually followed through.

THE PEOPLE FACTOR
The other piece to a successful site, is traffic.  We want to rank highly in Google to get more site traffic and more site traffic helps to get higher Google page rank.  The biggest part of keeping site visitors on your site and coming back?  Fresh content.  No one comes to a site to read the same thing over and over, nor to read things that are out of date.  People want what’s new, which leads me to –

RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Whether you update your content yourself or by paying a webmaster there is still a considerable investment required in time to develop new content.  Often this is where folks run into problems.  They have time to enter the content or monetary resources to have someone else do this work. Coming up with new original content on a regular basis takes a time commitment and time is money. What is important to remember is that just getting a website up was a monetary investment, and while there are no guarantees that seeing your site investment through by maintaining dynamic content will garner a return there is no doubt that keeping a static site will not.