The key with site updates are that they should cater to your users needs. If you own a news site, visitors want to see the latest headlines.  And that might mean you need to update many times throughout the day. But what if you own a basic information site?  Should you just add content for the sake of adding it?  NO! Of course not.  You should add things that people want, that will attract new people, make them bookmark, send to friends, etc.  Remember: Quality over quantity.

The frequency of your updates should be directly related to the frequency that content worthy of posting comes to you.  This means that if you have a blog, only blog when good ideas come to you or when you have enough in your mind to write a quality peace of content.

I have also heard of a more technical approve to updating your website.. and that is: update your site as soon as the last piece of content you added got indexed by search engines.  This is a more “formulatic” method that is good to keep search engine robots coming back to your site, but it certainly isn’t scientifically proven to help, just another idea.  There are some downsides to doing this though:  if your site gets a lot of love from Google and gets a robot visit from them every hour… you will be constantly updating.  However, if Google  comes to your site once in a blue moon and therefore you only update like once a week or less, your visitors might get pissed off that you never add new stuff.

So, I guess in conclusion, I should say again that frequency of updates aren’t as important as the quality of updates.  Content is king.  Whether you update twice a week or twice a day, just make sure it’s good stuff.