Written by Bourn Creative CEO, Brian Bourn.

Updating your website content for your readers and the search engines is one of the most important things you need to be doing on your website. One of the easiest ways to consistently provide fresh and focused content is through blogging.

You can read our blog post Blogging for Business: 3 Reasons Your Small Business Needs a Blog to learn more about how blogging helps business.

When it comes to blogging, linking new posts to old blog posts is a key strategy to keep all of your content relevant and help your readers easily find more on the subject you are writing about.

As your blog grows, especially if you are blogging three or more times per week, trying to remember or find what you have written about in the past can be incredibly time consuming. And, trying to remember what pages and what other blog posts you have linked to is almost impossible.

Unfortunately, this information is extremely important.

For example, say you post a few posts to your blog and link back to a page on your website. But then, down the road you rename or delete that page. Guess what? Those blog posts now contain broken links, which are bad for the user and bad for your search engine optimization results.

The best way to organize and track your posts and links is to use a spreadsheet, such as excel, to organize your blog content with the following columns:

• Category:
  Your blog posts on your spreadsheet should be grouped by article or post category, such as Web Design, Email Marketing, Graphic Design, etc. Organizing your spreadsheet by category will allow you to see how many articles or posts you’ve written on each subject, what areas you haven’t covered, and what areas you could elaborate on.
• Post Date:
  This is important when trying to decide what to blog about. You can look at your post dates within each category and see what you haven’t written about lately. Delivering a new post in category you haven’t written about in a while with links to the old posts will help your content remain relevant.
• Title:
  Unique and well written headlines are the difference between a user clicking your link and reading your post or skipping over it. Tracking your titles in your spreadsheet will make it easy to see what headlines you have used in the past to avoid duplication.
• URL:
  This is simply the web address of the post and an efficient spot to grab the code when creating links for new posts.
• Linked To/Linked From:
  Keeping track of what your posts are linked to and linked from is important for many reasons. If you delete or rename an old post or web page and break a link, your readers will receive a website error. This is bad for both the user and search engines. Linking other pages on your site to your blog is also a great way to for your readers to get more content of what they are looking for.

So, whether you decide to do it yourself, or hire your virtual assistant to do it for you, dedicate time now to get you blog organized before it gets even bigger. Trust me, it will only get harder.

If you would like help building and organizing your blog, contact Bourn Creative CEO Brian Bourn at brian@bourncreative.com to schedule a consultation!