Image courtesy of The Shopping Sherpa

Posted by Chad Bolender

Spring is here! Time for renewal, rebirth, and that cleaning you’ve been putting off all winter. High on your list of items to get in order should be your company’s website. Nothing turns off a visitor and undermines your credibility like a dusty and neglected site.

Items to double-check:

• Copyright date
• “Updates” section
• Old Content
• Blog
• Headlines

Copyright Date

Is the date at the bottom of your company’s website current? This is easy to notice and easy to fix. Make sure your copyright date  is for the current year.

Company Updates

Do you post recent company updates on your site? Was the last update from 2009? Post something exciting your company has done in 2011. If there hasn’t been anything worth mentioning, consider axing the updates section from your site.

Old Content

Read through all the copy on your website. Does it mention people or products that are no longer with your company? Is the information up to date? We see these pages every day and it is easy to stop really looking at them. Meticulously read through About pages and product descriptions. You can be held liable for advertising false information on your site, even if it was correct when you posted it.

Blog

Most blogs start out with high hopes and good intentions, but after a while, the chore of weekly updates becomes too much. First one week is skipped, and then two, and then it dies. Consider breathing new life into your blog with a post or two. If that is too much work, consider removing the link to it from your site menus until it can get the attention it deserves.

News Headlines

Nothing says fresh like up-to-the-minute news headlines. Using our award-winning Newsdesk 4 application, you can post links to niche-specific stories that can give your site that extra bit of freshness. It gives visitors a reason to come back to your site, even if you can’t manually update it every day yourself. Check out a live example on the right side of this page, see a preview of the custom RSS feeds you can use, and try out the even more powerful Newsdesk 4 yourself!

We’d love to hear other areas to watch out for in the comments.

Download the app here and let us know if there are any events you think we should be covering in the app!

We’ve still got all the sport feeds you’re familiar with but now added the ability to create your own saved searches and customised feeds.  So search for your favourite team or niche sport over our categories to get breaking news and latest scores from global sport news sources.

We’ve also added localised menus for US, UK, Global, and Event (think the Ryder Cup, Tour de France etc) focused sport, so whatever your interest we’ve got it covered.  Download the app from iTunes here, and as before tell us your thoughts so we can score another app success!

The app allows users to keep up-to-date with breaking sport headlines from global news sources across 25 different sport news feeds including football (soccer and American), baseball, basketball, Formula 1, golf, tennis and many more. You can also browse through the top sports stories of the day or search the news for the latest views and scores on your favourite team or athlete.

Behind the scenes the app is constantly checking the Web’s news sites for breaking headlines and links back to them whenever you click a headline. The Moreover Sport News app covers sport-specific and local news sites, along with the familiar sites such as the BBC and ESPN we all know, so whatever your sport we’ve got it covered.

Other features include a “more stories like this” functionality, email this article and post to Facebook.

Download the app here and be sure to leave us any feedback you have in the comments section below!

(image credit HiMY SYeD / photopia)

RWW posted an engaging piece just before Christmas on the gradual ebbing away of the usage of RSS Readers as a means of consuming information, you can read that post here.

However, the ensuing debate and the new year have seen a new appreciate for our old friend Really Simple Syndication. Whilst it remains clear that Google sits firmly atop the RSS Reader pile people are still using RSS feeds as a handy and functional way of to keep up with news.

Readers still offer users a degree of control over content that you just don’t get with real-time streams, such as Twitter, although lists are a step in that direction. The categorisation and control that RSS Readers offer is invaluable to some, and as Readers continue to evolve, especially in the mobile space, I’m sure they will continue to have a future.

What RSS Readers do you use, any favourites? Don’t forget to check out the free Moreover RSS news feeds for content on a wide range of topics from news and blogs.

Subscribe to Moreover’s free RSS news feeds to read up on all the action, from Michael Owen’s first United injury goal to who tops the table come May. If you’ve any thoughts on the feeds or don’t see your team (sorry, no Football League teams just yet) then drop us a comment below.

You can also select one of the prebuilt feed categories and search within that – by sticking to a predefined universe of content you can get even more specific with your results.  The full list of the new blog feeds is also on the prebuilt feeds page, just click the green RSS icons,

We hope you like these latest additions! Let us know if you have any comments, we love to hear from you, or if you’ve got a blog you want us to include in the search just drop us a line with the address.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/9-stratgies-for-finding-incredible-content/11271/

Thanks Search Engine Journal!  Good feedback too about finding the right content, we’ll continue to work on those features. In the meantime users can adjust relevancy of the results with the two slider bars there – the relevancy filter looks for articles that mention your search keywords the most, while the sources filter lets you select just top sources. You can also search within any of the prebuilt news categories.

At the moment it’s just news but we’ll be adding blogs soon, check back in the next week or two.

But the big new thrill is that you can run your keyword searches over our 600 news categories (‘woods’ over golf news, ‘black hole’ over space science news, etc) and effectively use the categories to filter the news for very targeted results.

screenshot moreover.com rss feed builder

including,

Anchorage news
Austin news
Charlotte news
Cincinnati news
Cleveland-Akron news
Colorado Springs news
El Paso news
Fresno news
Hampton Roads news
Honolulu news
Jacksonville news
Louisville news
Nashville news
Portland-Salem news
Raleigh-Durham news
Sacramento news
Silicon Valley news

The total feed count is now 630, though with the search option you can obviously create your own, as many as you like.  Missing any cities from the list? Send us a note via the feedback page!