Managing content on a Web site requires thinking like an editor - but also like a librarian. Building a site archive of content also will build a much bigger audience.

Important lessons in the online environment keep repeating themselves. One of them is how to keep growing content and audience on a Web site when there isn't enough money to hire more editors.

That lesson can be found at the public library.

When a newspaper publishes a story, it gets thrown away with the paper. When a Web site publishes that story, it often gets buried so deeply that it rarely is seen again. In fact, it often is deleted, especially when a site changes its servers, content management software or for other reasons. When a library buys a new book, it stays on the shelves for years, even decades, before finally going away.

Are stories from 10 years ago still on your Web site? How about even a year ago?

Newspapers are valuable for the quality of their content. The Internet is valuable for the quantity of its content. Libraries are valuable for both.

Newspaper Web sites may be gaining audience, but they are losing market share because other sites are growing faster. One important reason why is because of the vast quantity of content on the Internet. Now anyone can be a publisher. So newspapers have to expand the quantity of their online content much faster while maintaining the quality of it.

If the profit, revenue and audience of a site grow 20 percent next year, how do you grow the size of the site by 40 percent?

It can be done with effective archiving. Plan on keeping every story as if it will be on the site for 10 years. Give it good keywords and put it in an appropriate section. Build site navigation and architecture that names every section and subsection by subjects the way a library would do it. Ask your friendly local librarian: If you could organize our site, how would you do it?

The end result will be a vast archive of content that will be spidered by search engines, bring more audience and grow that audience exponentially over time.

One way to track the effectiveness of a site is with a tool at Yahoo called Site Explorer:

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Enter your site name to see how many pages have been indexed by Yahoo and how many links go to the site. I looked at three newspaper sites - two large dailies and one mid-sized daily.

- The first large daily had 88,000 pages indexed and 36,000 inlinks.

- The second large daily had only 19 pages indexed and 39,000 inlinks.

- The mid-sized daily had 874,000 pages indexed and 489,000 inlinks!

It shouldn't be a surprise that the much smaller mid-sized daily has
enormous traffic for its size. The main reason - over many years, it
didn't throw away its content.