Keep your content fresh and up to date
How do you make sure that all content on your website is still relevant? Why is that even important? For some of you, coming up with new ideas for blog posts seems the biggest challenge of blogging. However, you want your existing posts to show up-to-date content as well. And that could well be an even bigger challenge!
Why is up-to-date content important?
Updating content is important, because you don’t want people to find information on your website that isn’t valid anymore. If you have optimized your post well, chances are that people will find that post in the search engines. That was the whole point of optimizing that post in the first place. Imagine a blog that hands out SEO advice to its readers. Older posts shouldn’t contain advice that isn’t valid anymore. People would make terrible mistakes in their SEO strategies.
Why is fresh content important for SEO?
Keeping your content fresh is important for SEO reasons as well. If you rewrite an article, Google will notice changes in that particular article. If you update your content regularly, you’re actually showing Google that your site is alive and up-to-date. You could either update an article – with or without changing the date – or you could republish the post.
Tips on how to keep your content fresh
1.Most important: update those cornerstones
Most important tip on keeping content up to date is to focus on your cornerstone articles. These articles should be the best articles on your website. These are the articles you want to be found for. So, these should be on the top of your list, while updating content.
2.Update those posts that generate a lot of traffic
Updating can be a lot of work. And if your site becomes really large, this could be a day job! If you have to make choices which articles to tackle and update first, take a look at which pages generate a lot of traffic. Start with those. These are the pages that are actually seen by your audience. These pages have the highest priority on showing fresh content.
3.Delete those really outdated posts
As your blog is growing and you’re writing tons of blog posts, some of your content just slowly becomes really old. Some posts are evergreens, but some posts just aren’t. If these articles aren’t read by anyone either, you could decide to delete them all together. This will clean up your site nicely!
4.Dont forget ‘other’ pages
Not only your blog posts should have up-to-date content, other pages are important as well. Don’t forget to update those FAQ. Perhaps new questions have emerged among your audience. Make sure to add those. While updating your website, don’t forget the ‘about page’, the ‘contact page’ and other static pages on your website. I understand that this content doesn’t change that often, but make sure that changes are actually being made!
Conclusion on how to keep cont
Keeping the content of your website up to date and fresh is important if you want to attract readers from the search engines with (somewhat) older posts. While rewriting and refreshening old content, make sure to start with those cornerstones and most popular articles first!
