Cyber Spring Cleaning – Maintaining Your Company Website
With many of the recent changes to the search engine algorithms like Google’s Curlup update earlier this year, the freshness of the content on a website has become increasingly important to the page’s ranking in the SERPs1. There has been a shift from identifying old content that attracted steady traffic as being an authoritative source of information, towards content that is newer or that has been recently updated. This in turn has changed the SEO equation for many pages that were relying on the traffic that is generated by their established content, and many older pages have dropped down the SERPs and been replaced.
The obvious solution is to produce a regular supply of quality new content to keep your page fresh, and many websites are now focusing more on this than on things like keyword optimization and link building to improve their page ranking. This is a good long term SEO building strategy but it also means that many websites will soon be full of old content, much of which is not doing anything positive for the website’s overall page rank.
Most websites that have been operating for a couple of years will have accrued a certain amount of information that has become out of date for one reason or another. Old blog posts can be updated to renew their freshness for the search engines and to bring the information in them up to date for your readers. The valuable content on your website will naturally attract the most traffic, and Google counts new links that point to it towards the freshness of the page, so posting links to old material on social networks can also be an effective means of giving it new life.
Everyone has had the experience of finding a promising looking website in the SERPs only to visit the site and be confronted by an out of date landing page with missing images and broken links because the maintenance on the website hasn’t been kept up. The rapid development of the web design options that are available makes it worthwhile to look at updating websites regularly to keep them looking sharp and to take advantage of new features that have been created. Planning to upgrade your website and edit its content at least once a year makes good sense, and now it will even be rewarded by Google in the SERPs.
Old content can be made to work for you again by being recycled to suit a new purpose. If you have a lot of old blog posts that contain information that you consider to be valuable, you could consider making an e-book from them to give away as a teaser on your landing page. Videos can be edited together in a similar way. Even just going back over your old posts and editing them will mark them as fresh content when the crawlers visit your site, giving them a new lease on life in the SERPs.
Because most traffic to websites comes from the search engines and usually takes visitors directly to a specific page or post, every page on your website is potentially a doorway into your site. Even so, a web page that doesn’t represent your business’ current message may be working against you. Taking the time on a regular basis to spring clean your company’s website can do as much for your online presence as an SEO campaign without having to create any new content or even a single new link. Talk to InfintechDesigns.com about how they can bring your corporate website up to snuff so that it is performing at its best.
References:
1.http://insidesearch.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html
