The relatively short history of the iPhone is an interesting study on not only innovation, but marketing as well.

Apple jumped quickly to the head of the smart phone race for a couple of good reasons. First of all the iPhone is a very well made product. It wasn’t the first smartphone, but it was the first to put everything that users wanted into an attractive package. Finally, there is no denying Apple’s marketing genius.

The other cell phone makers were in a race to catch up. When it seemed as though they might be on the verge of catching up, Apple had a new version of the iPhone ready to take the world by storm.

The thing is, for all the hype and speculation that surrounds the release of a new iPhone, other than being a few millimeters thinner, and a few ticks faster, there really is not that much difference between the original iPhone and the iPhone 5. This reflects a marketing practice developed in the 1950’s by the American automobile industry call Planned Obsolescence.

Consumers tend to believe that planned obsolescence means designing products to fall apart on a regular basis. In fact, it means putting the best and most desirable features on the top of the line models, then move them to the rest of the products later while adding newer and better features to the top. This means that consumers will want to buy the latest and greatest in order to stay fashionable.

This tactic is beginning to be less effective in consumer electronics. People are finding that they are perfectly able to watch YouTube and send emails on their four year old laptop, and the average time between upgrading cell-phone handsets is increasing as well.

While our tech devices do not become obsolete nearly as fast as manufacturers would like us to believe, the content that consumers see does. Accordingly, this is one of the elements that the Search Engines look at when they are ranking websites.

The need for fresh, interesting, and quality content simply cannot be over emphasized. From a purely SEO stand point, your page will not be ranked or re-ranked unless it gets seen. This is not to say that the Search Engine Spiders will not revisit a page that they have seen before, but one with new and fresh content is bound to attract more attention.

Search Engines and Spiders are just robots, they can tell when there is something new on a site, but they depend on algorithms to tell them whether the content is any good or not. Human visitors do not have this limitation, and will decide for themselves whether or not the site they have opened is worth sticking around on.

Fresh and up to date content is even more important to attract and hold human visitors. How many sites get opened only to greet the user with blaring Auto-play music? Java tricks like auto-play were fashionable just a short time ago. Today, not only do they alert everyone else in the office that the user is surfing on company time, but they fairly scream “2008” to the user.

There are several ways to keep your website away from obsolescence. A regularly updated blog which features useful information is a good tool. Another is to take 30 minutes for a Free Consultation with Marketing Expert Chad Morgan.