Going Evergreen: Wise Ways to Recycle and Repurpose Website Content
If you haven’t discovered the potential benefits attached to evergreen content or don’t fully understand what the term means, you could be missing out on a great opportunity to keep your website looking fresh and making it relevant to every visitor.
Here is a look at what evergreen content is and what it can do for your website, how your web pages are interpreted by search engines, and ways to create content that doesn’t really have an expiry date.
Dated as soon as you publish
Depending on the nature of your business and the type of content you normally publish on your website it is perfectly normal to try and keep visitors returning to your website with new stories and features that discuss current events.
The problem with that strategy is immediately obvious. If you don’t keep constantly updating the content and addressing an ever-changing selection of developments and news items that you might feel compelled to talk about, your website can soon look very stale to a new visitor that lands on one of your pages.
Evergreen content is designed to remain topical and relevant to your readership whenever they decide to pay a visit to your website.
As you will discover when you talk to someone like Web Full Circle, the idea behind evergreen content is to publish content that is always applicable to reader interests and is written in a way that it not only stays fresh indefinitely but also manages to be easily found by search engines.
The top slot in the rankings
The aim of evergreen content is that it achieves a good level of interest and relevancy without becoming dated.
The importance of this cannot be understated as that perfect combination will help to not only deliver a decent level of traffic to your website but crucially, evergreen content has a much higher chance of holding a lofty and valuable position in search engine rankings for months and sometimes years after it was first published.
Understanding search engine optimization
You couldn’t possibly expect to be able to define how search engine ranking systems work in just a couple of paragraphs, but if you have a grasp of the basics that can at least give you an idea of what they are looking for when ranking your content.
There are three specific stages in the search engine process.
The first part is called crawling, which is the search engine discovering content published on the web. This is closely followed by an indexing process which involves an analysis of keywords and how your content is arranged and stored.
The final part is known as retrieval, where a user query returns a list of relevant pages that match indexed keywords.
Regardless of whether you fully understand how each system works or not, the fundamental part to remember of the process is that if the content has not had that many views or traffic recently, the search engine algorithm will in effect downgrade and index that page accordingly.
If your content talks about a general topic rather than a current event, this would allow it to retain a high ranking, in other words, it has succeeded as being what you would call evergreen content.
Steer clear of statistics
It can be just as helpful to understand what evergreen content is not as much as it can pay to comprehend how to structure your content to satisfy search engine criteria.
A good example of what to avoid when trying to create evergreen content would be the use of statistics that have the ability to change or become outdated in a short space of time. Talking about the employment data for the last quarter, for example, would be immediately out of date as soon as the next batch of figures is released.
Creating evergreen content
Take the time to think about what you are writing about and work out a list of best practices that you known tick all the right boxes, so that you can then use those guidelines whenever you are trying to put together evergreen content.
A typical evergreen article would cover a “how-to” section or general advice that doesn’t change over time. Sticking to general concepts relevant to your industry rather than touching on recent developments that have made the news, are also strategies that will help your website content to score consistently well with search engines over a period of time.
Unless you want to be constantly uploading new content to your website on an almost daily basis, the smart move would be to create some evergreen content that always stays relevant to your visitors.
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Author
Ben Waters is a copywriter and SEO master. He discusses these topics and the best practices and search engine industry changes in his articles.