You can’t tell by looking out the window, but springtime is officially upon us, which means only one thing — time for Spring cleaning. This is the time to refresh, re-invigorate, and re-dedicate yourself to the many tasks and responsibilities you’ve accumulated over the past few months. But note, when you finally get around to “cleaning up” your website, the traditional “Out with the old, in with the new” attitude just won’t cut it. You never want to dispose of content, especially if that content is generating traffic to your website. Rather, your goal is to add, update, and modify existing information and links that can be found on your site. Think of it not as Spring cleaning, but as a kind of Spring “touch-up”, an opportunity to build and improve on what’s already there.

Our experience has taught us that there are four main aspects of nearly every company’s website that need to be constantly monitored and updated: they are the company’s services, its products, its clients, and its general industry news. As a service provider, you might logically be more concerned with continually updating the list of your offerings and capabilities. These should be up-to-date all year round as is, which usually makes for dynamic sites that are quite “clean” and “fresh” at any given point. (Therefore, service-provider sites are frequently search-engine friendly.) Product providers, however, often find themselves in a different predicament: since product-based companies focus on rotating products, replacing relevant images and content in convenient copy-and-paste like fashion, their website can easily be straddled with static, old pages that are never updated because they seem so “non-essential”. Of course, product providers also need to address the problem of marketing old products that continue to generate traffic to their website. If the company maintains a page for a product it no longer carries, it risks disappointing both the potential customers who land on the page, as well as the search-engine bots who crawl it.

Unfortunately, the solution to this problem is not so clear-cut. Some in the SEO industry suggest using a 301 redirect to automatically lead visitors away from old pages/products to newer ones. Others claim that such redirects are actually looked upon unfavorably by search-engine bots. At SalemGlobal, we choose to follow the safest SEO route: if an old product or services page has been indexed by Google and continues to generate traffic, use the very same page to either substantially modify what’s there or upload new relevant information. If this is not possible, take your chances with the 301 redirect.