I'm writing a company blog and want to update one of our recent posts about our product's feature.
Should I add 2-3 paragraphs of update at the beginning or at the end of the post?
Great examples are welcome :)
P.S. The update is going to be visually distinguished from the original text.
The thing about updates in texts is that there are different ways you can do them and none of them is correct or incorrect. It mostly depends on your companies culture. Are there examples of how someone did it in the past? Is there a styleguide that dictates certain things so that your company has a consistent external image? Did you just do a relaunch of certain things and want to go with latest trends in certain designs or come up with a design principle of your own?
One possibility is to put updates at the beginning of a text. This helps readers who have already read the original text to quickly get an idea about what you changed and whether it's worth rereading the article.
You may also just update the description and not mention anything. Maybe adjust a version number somewhere in the title or a comment or somewhere near the name of the author so that people may see what changed. It can be a good idea to summarize changes at the end in that case. This may be preferred because the beginning looks consistent across multiple posts. There is not a weird block with editing notes and version numbers that do not really have anything to do with the product itself.
Another possibility would be to refrain from editing existing articles as best as you can. Just make a new article. That way it's clear from the order of publishing what happened when and which the newest version is. You can then make a little edit to put something like "This is an older version, see here for the newest update!" at the beginning of the older one to show readers who for example bookmarked the page where to find the newest information about the product.
All in all it boils down to your companies culture and the way you want to show yourself and your products to people reading the blog. When in doubt I would suggest to write a new article and change links on older versions. This may become troublesome if you have lots and lots of very little updates, in which case you may just want to change the "Last edited" or version number at the beginning and mention an edit history in the end. Look at how versioning is down here on StackExchange - that may give you an idea.
Great question! And @Secespitus raises some good points as well. However, I'd like to add a few additional things you might want to consider.
In today's atmosphere where everyone is trying to create content to attract as much traffic as they can, the last thing that is needed is more content articles. What is needed though, is more relevant, high-quality content.
That said, I agree with Secespitus that you should double-check with the company or blog's editor whether or not there are company protocols or precedents regarding the format of the blog.
If no precedent exists, you can generally gain cues from the comments people have left in the past and any follow-up questions they had can give you an idea of how the audience prefers updates to be made. In ANY case, if you update an article, ALWAYS make a note of it!
The above screenshot is from Google's own Webmaster's Blog. Smart money says that if Google is doing it on their own blog, then it's either a requirement or a good practice to get in the habit of(if you want to rank well in Google's SERPs (search engine ranking pages).
When writing or updating a business blog, it's vital to keep SEO in the forefront of your mind. It's fairly easy to much up your SEO by not paying attention to what you're doing.
Here are a few tips to avoid hurting your SEO when updating a blog article
Do NOT change your URL/Slug: If you can avoid changing the URL by not altering the slug (ex: www.yoursite.com/best-practices-Blog), then keep the URL intact. Otherwise, the new URL will not get any of the SEO juice from the old post which will now be a 404-Page Not Found Error. No Bueno!
If you must change the URL, be sure to correctly redirect the old URL to the new one using a 301 Redirect so you get all that good "SEO Juice" flowing to the updated URL.
Using HTML to Scroll to a Link on the Same Page: Update/Replace the old information with the current & correct information where appropriate in the article. But, be sure to document the update/revision with a footnote marker & cite the source at the bottom of your post/article.
If you wanted you can also use HTML to automatically scroll to a specific point on the page. Here's a decent article explaining How to Link Within The Same Page. Use this to link from your Update Notice at the top of your article to the updated portion of the page.
Hopefully, this helps you with your updating tasks. Just remember, most important to your SEO to Google and Bing respectively, is useful, accurate, well-developed content that your readers engage with.
Good Luck!
