Industry News & Trends

By Michael Murray, VP-Search Engine Marketing

The world of natural search engine optimization hinges on a lot of elements, including content, inbound links, HTML, source code conformity, etc.

Among that group, you can't overlook the power of the page cache. Sometimes website marketers don't spend enough time studying these trends when evaluating the effectiveness of their programs.

The following four-part primer can help you understand page caching and how to leverage it to make your website perform better.

1. Know The Terminology.

The cache date just refers to the last time a search engine checked out your website page. You need to develop a sense for how often a search engine (such as Google) stops by to understand how your SEO efforts are doing. Is it once a week? Once a month?

2. All Dates Aren't Equal.

Your home page will likely have the best cache patterns, although some interior pages could be cached more frequently. Typically, the home page is crawled and indexed more often simply because it's the oldest page on a website. With the influence of inbound links, it also gets the attention of search engines because other websites link to a home page by protocol.

3. Make Your Move.

If you know when the next cache will likely arrive, plan your strategic moves around the potential date. Why post your revisions the day after the last cache? Take care to adjust the source code, content, internal links, page titles and more. Post your new strategy.

4. See How Well You Did.

You don't need to time your website updates with the cache dates, but it doesn't make sense to go in blind. If you catch the next cache wave before it comes in, you'll be able to tell how your modifications performed among the top rankings. Timing is everything. It's best to have a logical baseline ranking report. Some people favor the top 30, but we often look at the top 100 to record headway. In some cases, we even look at the top 300 for competitive keywords.