I know that regularly updating your website helps increase your search rankings but what exactly is meant by updating? Can you just swap a few word on your homepage or do you need to add a lot of content to it? Do you need to add new pages to your site for it to count as updated? Thanks
You can do both. Just make sure your updates are meaningful. Best bet is to try and post a few new pages a week. The search engines love new info, but if you don't give them any how can they love you?
Your missing the whole concept of "updating" content, this doesn't mean change content on already indexed pages but to provide new web pages with new content. Proper internal linking can make this even more of a benefit to your site. When you update a site you should be adding new web pages with new content, not removing current content with new content. You can actually lose your rankings by changing content on your web pages, to continue building SEO weight towards your current web pages work on your off-page optimization factors (assuming your on-page is to par). This is simple terms means get more natural one-way quality backlinks.
you can update your site many different ways. you can update your homepage with content, links, add a link to a new page of your site, add a sitemap, etc.
As usual, ssandecki makes an excellent suggestion. The only statement I would have to challenge is that of If you are new to SEO and learning as you go, you will come to realize over time some of the mistakes you may have made on previously published content. By correcting those mistakes as you learn you can actually increase your ranking for that page.
Quoted earlier - " You can actually lose your rankings by changing content on your web pages." I have found that changing content "too much" will drop your rankings temporarily. I have most often than not came back better than before, but there have been times I wondered if the changes I made were a mistake. Usually, no. But, the SE's had me sweating bullets a few times...
i use a newletter form to my index page, and it changes weekly , this is what they mean by updating, not adding new pages, thx Todd
That's why if you noticed those regularly updated sites like blogs or forums, they tend to get good rankings.
As long as by "updating" you mean adding quality content (which allows you to get quality links, etc) you will improve rankings... just "updating" for the sake of updating and possibly increasing rankings would 1) not really work, and 2) if it did, wouldn't give you a real *solid* rank increase. It'd be a transient little blip if you pointlessly add a few words, delete a few things, that'll do absolutely nothing.