Updating Old Articles

Many of the posts on our website are more than 18 months old and lots has changed since then. We need to, from time to time, review old content and make sure it is still up to date and conntected to any related content existing on the site.

Here are some steps to take to review old content

1. Are their suttas on SuttaFriends.org that could be linked to?

When most of our sutta pages were created SuttaFriends.org did not exist.

• Is the sutta translation on our website directly from SuttaCentral and is there a new translation on SuttaFriends.org? If so, ask the Bhantes if we should replace it with the translation from SuttaFriends.org
• Are their links to suttas on SuttaCentral that exist on SuttaFriends.org? If so, change the links to ones to SuttaFriends.org
• Check the topics page on SuttaFriends.org to see if there are related suttas that we can link to on SuttaFriends.org. If so, add more links!
• Is there a topic tag on SuttaFriends.org related to the topic of the page? If so, add a link to the SuttaFriends.org topic tag. (e.g. suttafriends.org/topic/alms-giving/)

Always make links to external sites (non serenecolombo.org sites) open in a new tab.

2. Does the post have questions for comment prompts?

We like to have people really engage with the content. We can do that by creating questions and asking people to answer them in the comments. Here are some examples:

To format the box, use the purple background and turn on Drop cap under Text settings.

3. Are their any broken links?

Broken links are frustrating! You can check a page automatically using ahrefs.com/broken-link-checker. Be sure to select Exact URL so it doesn’t check the whole site. You can also just check the links individually to make sure that they take people to good pages.

4. Is there related content on our website that should be linked up?

There are no hard and fast rules for doing this. But one place to start is by looking at the main menu of the website and see if there is major content that should be connected. You should also look at the tag cloud that appears in the column or footer of every page. Finally, you should do a search of the site.

Of all the improvements we can do, internal links (links to pages on our own website) will have the greatest impact not only on Search Engine Optimization, but it will help people stay on the page longer and find more content that interests them.

These links can be either to individual posts or whole tag archives (e.g. serenecolombo.org/tag/gratitude/) It could be as simple a sentence like:

Learn more about gratitude.

5. Does the post have an appropriate featured image?

With our new data box, we can see important information at a glance. Whatever the featured image is will appear on the left.

If there is no image, then there is no featured image! Talk to the Bhantes about creating one. If it doesn’t seem appropriate, or if there are errors, Talk to the Bhantes about fixing it.

6. Does the post have a custom excerpt? Is it good?

If we don’t add a custom excerpt, the ... Read more text will appear at the end of the displayed excerpt. This means WordPress is simply taking from the first few words on the page. We should always create a custom excerpt of between 20 and 30 words.

It goes in this box in the right side settings panel:

These excerpts appear in many places on the site, especially on the What’s New section of the home page:

Try to make them interesting so people feel like going to the page.

7. Are there good tags? Is the Category correct?

In the image below you can see that this post doesn’t have any tags at all. Not all posts will have tags, but most should. Try to make sure there are one or two using our tagging guidelines. It is unlikely that the category is incorrect, but you can pay attention to it any way.

Examples

AN 8:41 The Uposatha With Eight Factors, In Brief is an example of a page that links to several other pages on serenecolombo.org as well as suttas on SuttaFriends.org. Notice the yellow box at the top and the yellow box at the bottom: