Reviving A Dying Static Website

by Matt on Jun.29, 2008, under Ramblings

Reviving a dying static website isn’t as hard as it might initally seem. In fact the hardest part is often just encouraging the search engine spiders to come back and re-index the site. The best way to do this quickly is to write a piece of compelling link-bait and submit it to the social bookmarking websites. If successful the search robots will begin to re-index your website on a more regular basis.

The key now is to continue to update the website regularly. Failing that you might want to target more SEO keywords on each of your pages to generate additional traffic to your website. You can use a tool like the Wordtracker Free Keywords facility for such a purpose. By targetting additional SEO terms you are likely to encourage more unique visitors to your website and subsequently increase the chances that someone will link to your site.

Just because you have not updated a website in a while is not an excuse to leave it to die. In fact during the period of inactivity the site may have gained additional link authority from the search engines. On the flip side, other sites may have started removing their links to your site. If this is the case you can simply emailing the site owners and inform them that your pages are back on the internet.

1 comment for this entry:

Byron Thurman
February 19th, 2009 on 11:59 pm
Yes, I had the same results, more authority but lower traffic until I update. My squidoo lenses we’re very steady in their decline, I’ve taken to making planned updates in advance then my sporatic posts are just suplemental to the planned content. Then I try to get all of my blogs ahead by a month, and maybe make certain posts way ahead of time, and seasonal and such. That way my blogs are contantly updated and it looks natural if you just set it ahead by hours not the minutes as well, then you don’t have a set scheduled post either it happens at a random minute. Of course this post is about static websites…