Content Maintenance

You can't just throw a site up there and ignore it. If you do, it will dwindle and die, unless you throw money at it. To keep it going under its own steam, you have to feed it with a bit of attention now and again. Now, a site does need a little technical maintenance on occasion too, but this page is focusing on just the maintenance that is necessary for content, and the reasons for them.

You'll want to monitor your site, and do the following repairs, updates, and improvements:

1. Rules change. If AdSense rules change, or if search engine rules change, you may need to adjust your content to compensate.

2. The world changes. If you provide information on a particular topic, and the standards or expectations, or technology, surrounding that topic change, you may need to update your articles.

3. People learn. You are likely to develop more expertise on your topic as you work. You may find that you no longer subscribe to a theory that you thought was perfectly reasonable a few months before, or that you now know a better way, or a caution, etc, that applies to something you posted earlier. Update it, and you'll be doing your readers a favor.

4. New Resources may be available. You may wish to add more resource links to individual topic pages over time as you discover new things that will help your readers.

5. To get the best search engine traffic, add regular new content. This means, add a page, or two, on a monthly basis, or at least, on a quarterly basis. This will keep the search engines regularly indexing your site for changes, so that if you are also doing optimization, they'll pick up on THAT too. Regular content updates gets people who come back, lists your site as more dynamic in the search engines (they don't like abandoned sites), and if you write your own stuff, you can modify some of it for article marketing.

6. Periodically, check the links in your site. Especially if you use content that someone else wrote. Make sure the site that the article links to is still safe and reputable. The web is a dynamic place, and things change, so you'll want to make sure that the outbound links in your site are not going to harm YOUR reputation. You should do this once every six months or so, or yearly at least.

Now, you can also follow your stats and see what people are using the most on your site, and use that as a guideline for things to do more of.

There simply is no comparison between a well maintained site, and one that has been abandoned. You'll get better traffic, and better earnings if you keep it up to date and pay attention to what it needs.