Many people still believe that creating as much content as possible on their website or blog is the key for high search engine rankings, but this is not the case. There are different levels of ‘quality’ content people submit on their blog and also different levels of website maintenance performed. If both of these are not implemented to the right standard, you can watch your competitors fly past you on Google’s rankings.
Maintaining Old Web Pages
As nearly all of us do, we write a blog post, publish it, do some content marketing to attract readers, links, social shares etc and then forget about it. Huge mistake! You should never forget about any of your web pages, no matter how old they are. Performing a high level of website maintenance every 2-3 months on old blog posts will keep your website looking fresh every time Google crawls your site. Isn’t this the whole reason you add blog posts in the first place, to keep your website with fresh content?
There are 3 types of website maintenance that people cover and I’m sure you fit into one of these categories!
1. Just A Website
Have your website built and then forget about it until you change a price, product or service.
2. Adding New Blog Posts
For website owners that add a blog post every now and again to add new content to their website.
3. The RIGHT Way!
Adding only top quality blog posts (see next point) and keeping ALL inner pages updated with fresh content (eg, home, about us, services etc) and updating ALL old blog posts with new content and up to date information every 2-3 months.
This is where nearly 90% of website owners fail with their SEO and Internet marketing by not maintaining old web pages. You should always go back to these old web pages every 2-3 months and maintain and update the content with new information as I’m pretty sure the info in a post you wrote 2-3 months ago will probably be out of date or something new about that post may have been discovered or researched. You can see why this level of website maintenance and post updates are important for your website in the next point!
Different Levels of Quality Content
Ideally the best way to get Google to take notice of you is by adding daily blog posts to your website, if you have the time of course! But what many people still do not understand is, there is no point adding content just for the sake of having something new on your blog. If anything it could have a negative effect on your rankings. For a minute lets just briefly discuss how Google operates when a user performs a search.
Google provide the user with the best possible results for their search query. Google does not only read the amount of good quality inbound links pointing to this result, but also how the user interacts with the post. If they have a quick skim though you post and then go back to the search results again, this tells Google that your post has not given the user the best answer for their search query. This means Google will start placing other results higher than yours that do not have this bounce back to the results effect.
This is why its important to have the best quality content on your blog that answers ALL questions the reader may have for their search query. Moz have recently created a post that explains the different levels of quality content, which level are your blog posts at?