Web Dev Notes

Greetings fellow bloggers, web developers and entreprenurs. Today, I’d like to bring up and important topic which may be holding back certain websites. Are your archives burying you worse than Digg?

This question is only relevant to certain types of blogs and websites. If your site is news focussed, this is not really a big issue for you. News websites require frequent updates with current news relating to the topic in order to be successful. However, other blogs and websites may be more focussed on tutorials and information which remains relevant regardless of it’s age.

Take this blog here for example. I have written some basic getting started with PHP tutorials which some people found useful when they were first posted. PHP has not changed since I wrote the articles, so they would still be useful today. If I’m lucky search engines will send those posts some traffic or another site will link to them. However, if I am not lucky, the post will be buried deep in my archives and users may never find the information again.

If I wrote a post reporting about Paris Hilton going to jail, I wouldn’t care if the information was buried forever, because today the post is old news. However, when you have written some really exceptional posts that are still relevant and useful today, you need to make sure they don’t get lost. Many websites therefore often link to their top articles in the header of their website or in a menu which is very visible. If the top posts are good, these websites have a better chance of getting their visitors to come back!

If you cannot edit the theme of your website or blog to include a top posts list, you should consider writing a post from time to time letting your visitors know about some of your best articles! Make sure your best material is read more often!

For an example of what I am talking about, visit the very successful problogger.com website. You’ll notice in the top left corner right below the website logo is a list of some of Darrens most popular articles. If you check the dates, some were written as early as 2004!

I’ve now been writing this blog for three months with a minimum of five posts per week! Thats over 60 articles, many of which are starting to get buried deep in the archives! Now that I have put in place a solid foundation, I also need to start following my own advice and help my visitors find the best of my older articles. I cannot edit my theme for this particular site, so from time to time I’ll now start writing a new series of articles titled, “Top 11 WebDev Articles”. Why 11? It’s my lucky number!

I’ve already explained why this would be a good idea, but here’s another example just to further stress why this is important. One of my more popular articles is related to formatting text in Wordpress. This article helped many people at the time and is still relevant today. The article also gets some search engine traffic, so I know its information people are still looking for and need! This is therefore an example of the type of post I would want to include in my top list!

Also remember, good internal linking will help search engines better crawl your website, help increase your page rank, and help increase your page views and readership! Just put yourself in your visitors shoes. If they visited your website and enjoyed your posts, they will then be very eager to find a list of your top articles to read those too!