To put it another way, fresh and up-to-date content is more important than ever before, and you need to take action!
So, to help you we have written a list of 7 strategies we recommend you implement straight away (if you are not already) in order to ensure that your site isn’t left behind.
1. Get a Blog: Google has made it clearer than ever, that it likes sites that publish fresh content. Publishing regular content on a variety of topics, as often as you can, is the best way to accomplish this. Installing something like WordPress doesn’t take long (and is even something we can do for you) and is the perfect software to use for your blog.
2. Use Link Bait: Publishing well researched, informative, and entertaining content can and does bring in thousands of visitors, hundreds of social media signals, and dozens of links, everyday. Content that ticks these boxes will result in higher rankings and is exactly what Google’s new freshness update was created to identify and promote!
3. Understand & Leverage Time-Stamps: As we already mentioned, Google is increasingly adding time stamps as part of its results. This timestamp is pulled directly from the article’s content. But how is this done, we hear you ask… Time stamping content is a must and is relatively easy to do in most blogging software suites (such as WordPress). The thing to keep in mind, is that Google recommends you display the date as: YYYY-MM-DD.
4. Embrace Social Media: There is nothing fresher than a Tweet, Stumble, Facebook status update, or a Google +1. Make sure you are using social media to push your content out, but are also using it to pull traffic and social signals to that same content. It’s also great to encourange your readers to generate content for you, as this improves your site’s freshness! The way they can do this for you, is by promoting your content (for example by retweeting it) or even by commenting on your blog posts (again very easy to do via WordPress).
5. Dynamically Update XML Sitemaps: XML sitemaps by default contain time stamps for each URL included within it. Making sure that your XML sitemap is updated as and when any content is updated on yoru website is hugely important. If you have a WordPress blog, this can be achieved automatically by using the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in. But for regular sites (as in those not running on WordPress or some other CMS), we suggest that you install a standalone XML sitemap generator that will generate and update your XML sitemap and when you update your pages. We recommend Unlimited XML Sitemap Generator created by XML-Sitemaps.xom
6. Publish more Press Releases: Nothing puts a bigger tick in the freshness and time-stamped boxes like a press release. More so now than ever, press releases may be the best and fastest way to give the search engines what they are looking for… fresh, juicy content. However, you must remember that a press release is probably only going to be considered fresh for a couple of days, a week tops. A good strategy to combat against this is to publish new press releases as updates/follow-ons to the previous ones. This helps ensure that there is always fresh content available for Google to serve on your behalf and which can also be used for link bait.
7. Get into Google News: We have put this at the bottom of our list, purely for the fact that it’s usually very difficult for single author/blogger to get into Google News. However, if you are able to get yourself into Google News you will be massively increasing the likelihood of your content will find its way to the top of the fresh search results.
Finally, an important thing to remember, is that freshness doesn’t always mean relevancy when it comes to search results. We believe that this factor will cause Google problems in the upcoming future, however, time will tell how they overcome these. Either way, watch this space!
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