Every owner of a commercial web site knows that frequent fresh content is needed on their pages in order to achieve and maintain a high listing on search engines which actively seek fresh content. Google sends out its 'freshbot' spider to gather and index new material from all sites which offer it. MSN Search seeks it too. I've noticed that MSN Search's spider pays a daily visit to a site of mine which has proper fresh content every day.

By incorporating fresh content, commercial web sites will remain competitive, for without it they will certainly fall down search engine listings and lose business. Besides, having something new keeps visitors coming back and attracts potential customers.

But creating and then manually uploading fresh content onto our web sites each day is hard, time consuming work, isn't it? What we want is a way of putting daily fresh content onto our web sites easily and efficiently. Let's look at current techniques available to us to achieve this goal and see which one offers a global solution to fresh content problem:

1) Server Side Includes (SSI'): These are HTML statements written by webmaster and uploaded onto server. SSI's inform server to include a specific block of text when a specific page is served to a browser or a search engine spider.

Because these scripts are compiled 'before' they are served, they remain 'visible' to search engine spiders and therefore will be seen as fresh content. Unfortunately, not all web hosts support SSI's; this is because server must 'read every page' on web site as it looks for include statements, a process which clearly reduces server performance.

How many web site owners have time to manually upload fresh HTML content onto their servers every day? Probably very few, which is why use of SSI's is not a global solution to fresh content problem.

2) Blogging: Google's Freshbot spider is so voracious for fresh content that it eagerly devours contents of common weblogs. But can a daily blog be used to influence listing of a web page under specific keywords or phrases?

It can, but for vast majority of web site owners, blogging is out of question. Putting up a daily keyword-rich business blog onto a web site is hard, time-consuming work, and it requires blogger to be a competent writer, too. Few business owners have time available or competence to write something new about their products or services every day.

Blogging is therefore not a global solution to fresh content problem.

Blogs can be described in many definitions and they are all correct.

Blogs are instant publishing. You write, you cut-and-paste images, you cut-and-paste links, you customize everything through a WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) interface, and with one click you publish your information or article.

A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links.

A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site, although there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people.