Fresh Blogs matter to winning out on SEO

Nothing signals quicker to a search engine that a website is old and not maintained than a blog full of ‘old’ posts.

It can come as somewhat of a surprise but Google and other search engines have been shown to place a lot of weight on how ‘fresh’ content is on a website, with particular attention to the blog.

Fresh blogs equal fresh traffic!

Here is a little experiment you can try, just commit yourself to writing one new blog every 7 days for a month. Assuming you are writing blog posts of at least 600 words in length each time (which is easy to do, it’s only 6 paragraphs in effect) and that the text is relevant to your website and actually worth reading; you should find an increase in your traffic and general search position…

Why is this? Well it’s simple, your blog is just designed to be easy to crawl by search engines – if you are using a website framework like WordPress – you will automatically get generated for you something called an RSS Feed. This is a special file designed to make it easy to ‘syndicate’ your blog – it also makes it very easy indeed for search engines to keep tabs of what is fresh on your website (in fact WordPress can ‘kick’ Google to pick up your blog post!).

How do I know this worked?

We suggest you use Google Webmaster and count the number of search phrases your website matched against at the start and the end – you should see an increase in the number of matching phrases. Also count the actual ‘click throughs’ from search – they should increase as well.

Content is King, all hail the King!

What must also not be forgotten is that each new blog post is in fact a new page on your website – which aids to the overall ‘pool’ of content on your website and thereby growing the size of your website to the search engines. Search engines want to index ‘deep’ websites that have at least 50 pages – in fact if you can get onto the few hundred all the better – it shows your website is real and not something ‘toy’ and thereby worth indexing well.

Use Images and Tags in your posts

A great way to get additional content ‘leverage’ is to include images into your posts and make use of Tags – i.e. use tags related to the main focus of your blog post – again this generates yet more pages…

Website Checker RSS Checks

To help you make sure your content is firing on all cylinders, the Website Checker has just been upgraded to include a few specific checks of the RSS Feed and how ‘fresh’ it is – this way you will know for sure if you have your blog and the RSS Feed all set up correctly.

Conclusion

If you want a quick and easy way of keeping your website ahead of the pack, we suggest you focus on turning out a new blog post at least once a week – it will quickly add to your online presence and improve your traffic.

 

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Keith

Director at Aykira Pty Ltd
Keith is a founder of Aykira & has over 18 years experience with everything Internet. From eCommerce to security, mobile to maps; large or small. PhD in Info Systems, member Australian & British Computer Society's, ex Yahoo. Architect/Engineer/Innovator.