How do you integrate fresh content?

SEO 101 tells us we should update the content on our websites frequently.
Should this fresh content appear on the homepage, or can it be placed on a secondary page?

What do you do if you have a site where adding content to the homepage will disrupt the design of your website?

anyone?

Google likes pages that look like article type pages... the homepage should evolve overtime but not really grow in size too much... that pretty much means you'll have to retire content to an archive. The leaf nodes of the site should use paragraphs where strategic words are links to other relevant and related pages.

If you take any particular google search you'll see a pattern in page size for the results in that keyword niche... tune for these page size sweet spots... they tend to be big enough to have some meat but not so big as to be overwhelming.

CNN, other news sites, and top ranking blogs etc... all kind of converge on these kinds of patterns. Just emulate the successful patterns and out perform on number of keyword matches and link build to at least PR3 (the next statistical advantage PR bump is at PR7)

Don't change too much... evolve... small tiny changes that phase in and out but leave the keyword vibe largely intact while the overall page content is about the same in size.

In my opinion, and it's only an opinion based on my own results and experience, placing new content on secondary pages is perfectly fine provided that there is a clear navigation route from your home page to the new page(s) you post.

Think about it, before blogs became the "in thing", the vast majority of sites grew in exactly this manner. When there was new content to publish, the site owner created a new page for it, and as long as there's a simple navigation system in place that keeps the new page(s) within a couple of clicks from the home page, the search engines would find it and index it just fine. It was also a good idea to have a sitemap in place too, but not absolutely necessary if your navigation system is clean and simple.

That still holds true, it's just that people have become so used to blog-based site architectures now that they almost expect fresh content to appear on the home page frequently.

That isn't what fresh content means. Fresh content means you add new, and hopefully meaningful and valuable content to the site on a regular basis, not necessarily the home page or any other page, but to the site as a whole.

Search engines just want to see evidence that the site is actively maintained and when they do they will hit it more often with their bots and show it a bit of love in the index. You can achieve this with either pages that frequently are updated (like editing a home page often or using a blog CMS), or by adding new pages to the site on a regular basis.

HTH

Thanks guys...looks like I'll be adding more pages linked to the homepage. Much appreciated!

All new and fresh content should be placed permanently on 'secondary' internal pages, but linked to from other pages to make them accessible to humans and spider bots - linking to the content from the homepage makes the new content easier to discover and tells the bots that the content is considered important enough that you would link to it from the homepage.

Your homepage could have short introductory snippets that describe the content, and then a 'read more' link that links to the full length article.

I build them on secondary pages, but do a "latest articles" heading on the bottom of my home page and list four or five of them. As long as you add something new every so often, the big G seems fine with it.