If I update my blog every single day, will that get me higher on the SERP's? Or does quality & # backlinks, title tags, etc. have more importance?.... Right now we're only posting say 1 a week.... but we still come up higher than blogs that post daily
For Google search placement what's going to matter most are your off-site SEO factors, links, followed by domain age and onsite SEO factors. Toward the bottom of the onsite factors list is your site's update frequency which determines how frequently Googlebot visits your site. You can go for months with no updates and still get a good amount of search traffic. I have a number of niche blogs that only get a new post every 3-6 months and they get 1000 or more unique visitors from Google every day. The only significant risk is that an aggressive new competitor can push you down in the results since Google loves fresh new content in most cases. However, I have seen cases where this push down is only temporary and my older, establish, domain regains it's previous ranking after a couple of weeks. The other thing is that if you're wanting to attract social/referral traffic as well, which can relieve you of some link building work, then more frequent updates are helpful.
it's true that the more regularly you post the more regularly your site will get visited by google and the better overall effect on your site, but it's better to write one high quality post per week then 10 spam postings. I do think though that you should aim for at leats 2-3 new posts per week to boost your rankings
What updating often does is gets google to your site more often. By using quality keywords, you could maintain your edge in the rankings. It also allows new fresh content for visitors to your site. However, if you are ranked well for a keyword, you can maintain it without a lot of updating by building quality links with that keyword and doing good SEO.
As a general rule, I update daily for the first 6 weeks, then every 2-3 days for the next 6 weeks. After that, I find once or twice a week is enough to keep the search engines interested.
2/3 times a day should be enough I think. Less frequent update means the interval between crawls gets bigger.
My site seems to stay at the top for a lot of different search terms because those specific pages have constant traffic.
get it to have 200 pages in 2 months then start posting 2x a month after that. that'll keep those robots and crawlers interested