We’ve talked about it before, and we’re talkin’ about it again…content freshness. In a recent blog post, Neil Patel talks about 4 content freshness tips to increase search engine rankings. Here are the 4 tips:
Tip #1 – Creation of new pages will impact freshness
Tip #2 – Document changes affect fresh content
Tip #3 – Time on Page
Tip #4 – New links to page
While nothing here is really earth shattering or new, he makes some great points by going into detail on each Tip. Here are my favorite, quick hitting, impact tips that Neil mentions.
#1 – “Increasing your traffic” – It’s simple, the more you blog the more traffic you’ll bring to your site. Since launching our new site back in June, we’ve tried to post at least 2 blog entries per week and, although it doesn’t always happen, we have significant in traffic, and rankings for keywords we’ve used in posts.
#2 – “Invite others writers” – This seems like a no brainer. Although we have not done this yet, this is on our list of to-do’s. We know plenty of experts out there that would be great contributors to our blog. If we had two guest posts a month we’d be increasing our blog content by 20% each month…and that would lead to more readers as well. Reach out to your network and see who’s ready to write!
#3 – “Review your posts daily, quarterly” – This is such a simple tasks but one that I seldom do. If you publish a blog, review it the next day. Make any updates or changes that come to mind when reading it the next day. It might be a typo, or adding a 5th thing to the list of 4 things. Whatever it is it’s keeping your content fresh. This can be especially effective if you are reviewing content from 2 or 3 months ago. All the sudden you have updated content you can now share and promote again. I need to get on this tip right away!
#4 – “Identify your less-important pages” – Basically find your underperforming posts or pages, check them out, and attempt to figure out why they’re not performing. Rewrite content or titles, add new images, and make any updates that you feel will take the content from good, or poor, to great. Sometimes we don’t know that our content sucks until the public tells us it sucks. Ouch.
#5 – “Time on page” – Google looks at the time spent on your pages. If folks are spending more time then you’ll surely get a boost in rankings. The converse is also true. So, using tricks to get more time on the site can really pay off. Use images in your content. Use video to get folks to stick around a little longer. They may not watch the whole video but they’ll have stayed on the page longer than if they just saw a bunch of text and then bailed. Also, using social plugins to get users to engage can increase time on the page. Facebook and Twitter both have interactive plugins worth noting.
And finally, the pièce de résistance, is…
#6 – “Write compelling content” – It’s not all about blog posts getting up twice a week, or once a day, it’s about writing good content. With so much buzz around the changes Google continues to make, the one thing remains true…write good, compelling content and people will read it. Here is another nice article, written by Laura Crest over at seocopywriting.com, titled “How to stop worrying about Google updates…and learn to love writing really great SEO copy”. The title says it all but the idea is just focus on making your content better.
If you do just a few of these things on a regular basis you’ll see marked improvement in your content readership and rankings. Check out the full blog post by Neil Patel for more great ideas.