Archiving Old SEO Material

When dealing with SEO the obvious thoughts in many minds will be about the future.

Where do you want the website rankings to be in the future?

What sort of content/material shall we plan to produce?

And so on.....

However many will not have seriously considered the often overlooked job of archiving website content. In the days of freshness being a huge factor in SEO it is not only of importance to produce fresh material but to remove the old stuff.

Many a time websites will make changes to their navigational structures but forget to carry out remedial work to save the link juice that may have been created in past content on the site. The resulting 404 errors that flash up "File not found" will do no good to websites rankings and are likely to harm it.

So what are the consequences of not archiving material?

Quite simply it can result in,

Loss of search engine visibility

Costs of Repair

Loss of Reputation and Brand Image

Redoing SEO to try and obtain rankings

Loss of Sales and Profit

Archiving Blog Entries

A blog is undoubtedly one of the most important parts of any website and plays a big role in organic rankings and provides an effective means to communicate with an audience. Many a time when the matter of blog archiving is brought up the usual two answers are,

1. Archiving?

2. The blog software does this for us.

Answer no.2 is an interesting one because I'm sure it relates to most people who use blogs a lot on their website. However you may be surprised to know that this type of archiving, ie by the blog program, is not the most effective way of storing blog content with regards to SEO.

One of the principal reasons for this is that users do not usually search for blog entries by date. They will generally search for it on a search engine or an onsite search facility and they type in the keywords of whatever material they happen to be looking for. Looking by categories and related content is also common therefore it is important that content has good linkage between itself.

Uncategorised pages and ones that just rely on tagged pages will just not do! Also be aware that tagged pages can lead to duplicate content delivery that as a knock on effect will harm your organic rankings.

In order to allow for good rankings progress a webmaster must be archived and categorized correctly.

Make Content Accessible for Long Term Success

Webmasters must consider certain factors when looking at archiving blog content such as,

Making content easily accessible to both the search engine and the user

Do the archived articles still link through to the homepage and to other articles?

If no archiving plan is set in place from the beginning then the longer term benefits will far outweigh the pain caused further down the line when it is realised an archiving strategy needs to be implemented. Of course by this stage we could be talking here about many thousands of pages of content that have gathered up over the years so the amount of work could be considerable.

One of the fundamental basics of successful SEO of a website is to take SEO factors into consideration when developing and building a site. Yet for all this the issue of archiving content is quite often left out from the initial SEO "to do list". Just make sure it features on yours.

Archiving SEO material is an important factor in any optimisation campaign and SEO Company UK, SEO UK ensure that such factors are taken fully into account when devising a marketing campaign on the web.

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