Without getting too technical, it does pay to understand how Google, Yahoo and other search engines do what they do. Search engines send out what are called “spiders” or “crawlers” or “bots” – computer programs that look through your site regularly (sometimes daily) and note what’s there in their database (indexing). Spiders look at elements of your site’s content such as story text, page titles, site navigation, links, etc. The more popular your site is and the more frequently you update it, the more frequently search engines will index your content.
So it stands to reason that the more frequently you update your content, the more vibrant your site will look to the spiders – which means they’ll visit you more often, which in turn makes your site more easily “findable” in search engines.
Offering lots of fresh content is one of the most important things you can do to improve your search rankings. Therefore, since citizen media creators generally publish a lot of news, you’ll probably have an inherent advantage in achieving good search rankings.
CAUTION: If you’re hiding your content behind a registration form, or a paid member wall, that won’t endear you to search engines. Search engines prefer content that is freely available. And while there are ways to let search engines see behind some walls, they can be complicated. At a minimum, if your site does require registration, at least make sure the page title, headline and top portions of your pages are freely visible.