The key to ranking well on Google is fresh content. This guide breaks down how you can use a few easy tactics to make sure your blog stays relevant and up-to-date, so it ranks higher in Google SERPs for long periods. Freshness is one of the more recent criteria that Google has included in its algorithm in recent years.
In truth, the Caffeine web indexing technology was designed to assist it in finding and identifying new material amid the massive volume of information released every day, an influence that impacted 6-10% of queries. Let me demonstrate how this works in reality. Take, for example, the US Open. You’ll get the following results if you search for US Open:
It’s barely been 16 minutes since the top news question was made. The next one will start in an hour. But, more crucially, the most recent game scores are towards the top, indicating that Google is attempting to predict semantically what the user wants.
However, not every published piece of the material requires the relevance that a high freshness score may provide. The following are some instances of material that might benefit from a freshness score:
- Current events — Whether it’s a riot in Syria or a country’s bailout, you want the most up-to-date and relevant information available. This implies that the most appropriate material, even if it isn’t the most authoritative, might be less than 10 minutes old.
- Elections or the US Open are examples of seasonal or bi-annual events that occur on a regular basis yet are predictable. For instance, when you looked for elections before Caffeine, you could have seen results from four years ago instead of today’s news.
- Material that is both useful and old — Some information is valuable and old, and Google sought a mechanism to compare competing pieces of content based on their freshness. Even though they were published two years ago, recipes and historical anecdotes are still relevant.
Most likely, you’ll fall into the last category: helpful but outdated information.
Tips to increase rankings by making your present material fresher:
1. Adding new pages will affect the freshness of the site.
A website with more pages added will be judged differently than a website with fewer pages added by search engines. To put it another way, a blog that produces material seven days a week will be rated differently from one that posts once a month.
Each method has advantages and disadvantages. The following are some of the benefits of more frequent content:
- Frequently indexing your material – Crawlers will learn when to return to your site based on the frequency of your fabric. For example, if you produce material once a month, crawlers will likely only visit your site a few times each month. On the other hand, they may see a couple of times a week…or even everyday, if you generate material on a weekly basis.
- Increasing your power – Regularly adding new material signals to search engine crawlers that you are relevant, or at the very least striving to stay relevant. While not definitive, relevance may imply to search engine spiders that you are a specialist. The other factor that indicates authority is the number of reliable connections that your pages get, as well as social signals.
- Studies show that blogging to search engine spiders more often leads to an increase in your traffic rate.
The problem of posting often is that it is dif and instantly provides high-quality information. As a result, some of your articles will be harmed.
On the other side, if you post on a weekly or monthly basis, you won’t receive the traffic boost, but you’ll be able to continuously provide high-quality material. So use it, and Kaiser the Sage is two popular blogs weekly, or monthly quality is always outstanding.
Both techniques have benefits that you may take advantage of. Here’s how to do it:
- Invite other authors to participate – Using guest authors, both Social Media Examiner and KISSmetrics’ blog produce high-quality pieces on a regular basis.
- Make a timetable — If you don’t want to hire freelancers, you’ll need to be self-disciplined. The first step is to create a posting schedule.
- Brainstorm fresh ideas – Your timetable is likely to be jam-packed with new ideas. Set aside one or two days every week to study and brainstorm blog article ideas.
- Create a month-long series of stories — Choose a month’s overarching topic and write one portion of that subject each day. You’ll have a quality guide like 31 Days to Blogging at the end of the month.
2. Document updates have an impact on new content.
Updating old documents is another approach to utilizing freshness to improve rankings. Let’s look at the three aspects of upgrading old papers and how you may impact each one.
The first consideration is the magnitude of the change:
- Review your postings daily — The day after you publish an article, reread it and make any required modifications.
- When connecting to one of your posts from a new article, do a brief assessment of that post. Are there any structural modifications you could make? Do you have any fresh suggestions? Is there anything you need to adjust about the title or the image?
- Examine your material – Schedule frequent evaluations of outdated information so that you can audit all of it once a year. You may, for example, examine 25% of your material every three months.
The second factor to consider is the pace of change. The frequency with which a page is updated impacts its score.
- Create a daily-changing home page – if you have a blog, this will come organically. Wired, an online magazine, also changes its home page regularly. Drudge’s home page changes as the headlines change. Is it possible to modify the image? What are the headlines?
- Create and maintain hub pages – A hub page is a place where you may collect articles related to a particular subject. Update the hub page with additional links as you write more articles on these themes.
- Encourage comments — Not only is comments an excellent method to build keyword-rich user-generated content, but they also show search engine crawlers that your material is relevant, engaging, and essential. If no one is commenting on your posts, the search engines will assume you aren’t an authority and will lower your page’s ranking. See the post How to Grow Your Blog by the Rule of 10 for a fantastic guidance on how to get more comments.
The next point to consider is the significance of a page. What page you edit and how much modification you make to that page affect your freshness score. Large modifications to less important pages might equate to relatively little changes to critical ones. However, it is widely acknowledged that updating less essential pages is preferable. Here’s what you should do:
- Identify your less essential pages — The first technique to divide your material into important and less significant sections is to consider your high-navigational pages, such as Home and About, as vital, while everything else is less so. Then, figure out which posts aren’t getting a lot of traffic or social shares.
- Resolve the issue – Consider why the less significant postings did not get as much attention. Not specific enough? Wasn’t the headline a little cheesy? Is the structure disorganized and cluttered? Fix the issue, whatever it is.
3. Keep track of how much time you spend on the page.
A page on which visitors spend more time is considered fresher by Google than a page on which visitors spend less time. In other words, Google recognizes that users are more likely to spend time on the new and relevant material.
Here’s how to spend more time on your website:
- Use pictures — BuildZoom observed that when it comes to time-on-page, SEO-optimized news releases with photos beat press releases without images. The final score was 2:47 to 2:18. Also, don’t forget to optimize your pictures for fast website loading.
- Use video — While results may vary, you should anticipate a 10% increase in time on the page if you use video. Again, the idea is to put it in the center of your material rather than at the top.
- Use Facebook social plug-ins – You may boost time-on-site and on-page by using Facebook social plug-ins. This kind of social proof keeps visitors on a website longer and might even motivate them to leave additional comments.
- Increase page load speed – Page load speed is critical from both an SEO and a user viewpoint. Users may provide search engines with information about page load speed. In other words, if people leave your site while a page is still loading, this may be considered a negative factor.
- Increase your time on-page by producing great content and SEO-friendly pieces, which is another way of saying, “write in such a manner that people appreciate your material.” Check out the How to Write SEO-Friendly Blog Posts and the Guide to Content Marketing.
- Design to emphasize content — Displaying your most compelling content using hub pages or “most popular articles” plug-ins is another way to increase page time. Additionally, a WordPress slideshow plug-in might be used to showcase “Featured” items on the main page.
4. Add new page links.
The pace at which a page receives links, as well as the age of those connections, have an impact on your freshness score. To put it another way, if you get links from new sites, Google will boost your freshness score more and receive connections from more ole pages.
That implies getting more new links is the best approach to improve your freshness score. Here’s how to get more new links:
- Keep up with the latest trends – If you can comment on the trending issue, you’ll draw links and social signals. For instance, when the Penguin Update was released, you might have gotten links by publishing an article on how to recover from it. Use Google Trends to find out what’s trending.
- Interview an expert in your field and then publish the interview on your blog to quote them. The expert and some of the blogs in their readership will likely link to it.
- Update an earlier post — To improve an older post’s freshness score, attempt to update it in a manner that encourages others to link to it from new blog articles. Then spread the word about it.
The vast majority of your links will come from fresh pages. It’s only natural…people will react to your fresh material with new content of their own. However, your material may be linked to an earlier page (such as a hub page).
Conclusion
Freshness is just one component of the Google algorithm. Therefore, it pays to have a thorough SEO plan since learning how to impact it will only get you so far. That approach should be centered on creating helpful material, which will automatically affect freshness and other criteria. However, as you’ve seen, there are a few tactics you may use to directly affect freshness and, as a result, your search ranks. These tips are targeted at improving the time spent on-page, which is why a resource like this is necessary.
Related Tags
- the best way to improve search engine ranking is with
- how to improve google search ranking
- how to increase google ranking for free
- what is seo
- how to increase seo on google