The power of your archives (and SEO)

On a recent Google search, a surprise came up in the results list: an article from the New York Times – from 1982.

It’s a good example of how powerful your archives can be when it comes to traffic-driving. One of the reasons sites like About.com come up in search results so often is the power of sheer quantity. They do coach their writers to write for SEO, and often even come up with topics based on search research, but at the end of the day, having a lot of articles on a lot of things can get you far.

What archives does your publication have that you could be putting online (preferably with SEO-friendly titles and URLs)? Are you making sure to put as much as possible online now – and negotiating with freelancers to get web rights for all content? What else could you be doing to increase quantity without sacrificing quality?

(By the way, pineapples apparently don’t ripen after they’re picked, which is really the answer I was looking for.)

A brief history of the power of social media

Still not sure about the power of social media, or looking for a refresher on what it can do? This Slideshare presentation by the group Social Media Influence is well worth the 15 minutes it will take to flip through it.

Don’t miss these opportunities

The Bivings Report just blogged the 404 page they designed for non-profit Panthera (make sure to click through to check out the visual). The point? Even on a well-designed, well-maintained site, a lot of people will end up landing on a 404, so design it well.

Other dead-end pages you should design with clicks in mind: thank-you pages (for forms, sign-ups, contests, etc.) are one. And even unsubscribe pages are good. Canadian Living, for instance, displays a fantastic dynamic page full of up-to-date links when you unsubscribe from their newsletters.

Make use of every touch point you have with your readers. It never hurts to make that one extra conversion.