I have a news and information page on our ecommerce site and lately I have been slacking on keeping it fresh. I was wondering if my keeping this unique and fresh helps any of the other pages on the site in terms of SEO and how? Thanks
Fresh content will encourage frequent visit by the search engine bots. This will only help you when you have written something new in your site that other Internet users are searching for it.. this will allow your site to appear on the 1st page since the bots index your site first rather than your competitors.
Even when it's not a blog, provide an RSS feed and submit it to the usual places. You can do that with a page where you just change the contents too, although it would be better to historize outdated content. With every update ping like with a blog, also add your feed to GoogleReader, iGoogle, MyYahoo, claim it at Technorati and so on. From this page link to your most important landing pages, and donate it some internal link love too. Make sure you acquire enough external links to make it attractive for crawlers which schedule their visits based on PageRank respectively link popularity (unfortunately, update frequency might be considered less important than popularity). Also add the page to your XML sitemap and provide an accurate change-frequency, change the last-modified timestamp with all updates, and submit the sitemap to all engines.
Whenever you write a new post and you see something in there that you know you've talked about before, make sure to link to it. Let's say you're talking about the Barry Bonds indictment. And you had a post about him breaking the home run record. When you talk about him breaking the record in the new post, hyperlink that sentence and link to your old article. Boom, it gets followed by the SE's.