Optimising old content? Start adding new content instead.

I’m no SEO expert, but even I know that adding new content to your site, new or existing, is critical.

It’s actually amazing how many sites I come across where the existing content sits around for years with nothing new happening. It’s not that having content that has been on your site for a long time is necessarily an issue, but there needs to be a strong focus on adding to and building upon that by bringing fresh content forward on your site.

Everyone knows that Google has not really ever been SEO’s biggest fan, and in many ways they may even see it as a way of getting around the systems they have in place.

Google has always penalised any form of frigging with its algorithm, so it’s no surprise that they are exponentially increasingly penalties for sites which they deem to be over-optimized. The simplest way to get around this without ‘gaming’ the system is to focus your energies on new content.

 

New, fresh, contemporary content

We’re working on a project currently where the client has a significant number of pages on their existing site covering everything from products to support articles.

As a part of this latest project to build them a new site, they have taken the steps to separate which pages should migrate across without change, however they have also separated out those pages which can be updated and ‘optimized’, however optimized by adding new and relevant content as well.

At first thought, many may look to re-optimise pages if they happen to see a site plateau or flatten, and while you may see some benefit from keeping that existing content fresh with an update or two, you really should instead be looking at what the most successful websites on the web do and do well – they write more new and relevant content.

Adding more content does not have to be a long arduous task either. Simply adding a relatively short but sharp blog post every day or two is enough to show that you’re paying some close attention to your site. You might say that more is better, however staying consistent is likely to be more important.

In a nutshell, regularly adding new relevant content to your site, and combining this with some simple maintenance to existing pages, you will see greater search performance.

And that means more traffic and in theory, more sales.