There are a couple ways to boost your blog traffic through search engine optimization. One way is to create new content that is mindful of SEO, which you should obviously continue to do at a steady pace.
Another way that is often overlooked, but that can provide a great return on time investment, is going back and analyzing your older content. This can be especially helpful if you started blogging before you knew much, if anything, about SEO.
You could very well have older content that already exists on your site that could potentially bring far more traffic than it does today. The nice thing is that it takes much less time to improve SEO for existing content than it does to create new content. Also, a poorly optimized post or article on an evergreen topic is just a missed opportunity to gain traffic.
Here are a few tips for doing some SEO cleaning of old content:
- Look for content that is evergreen. There is less page-view reward in spending time optimizing content that is clearly dated and no longer relevant.
- Look for content that is getting less traffic than you think it deserves.
- Do fresh research on popular keywords. You might find that even a well-optimized post on a subject for one keyword phrase from a year ago might do better targeting a new keyword phrase that is being searched more currently.
- Spend a couple hours and go through redoing titles, meta tags and the content itself to better target your keywords.
- You might even consider recycling an older post that is relevant today by changing the post status date to a current date. Just be sure if you do this that you read the post closely for any references that will give away its old date. Freshen it up with new information or links for regular readers who might recognize the content. Also consider whether to leave comments, since a year-old comment on a day-old post is a big sign of recycled content.
- Keep tabs on which content you’ve edited, and watch stats for the coming weeks to see if the time investment yielded better page views.
You should still focus your attention on new content, of course. But a few minutes here and there freshening up and re-optimizing old content can go a long way in boosting your traffic.
bobby rio | November 13th, 2007 at 12:04 pm #
i can attest that this is good strategy. i do this about once a month where i find an old post that i know should be seen more… ill edit it a little, change the title, add some better keywords… i usually admit to my readers that i posted a similiar article in the past but i thougth it was worth re exploring.
PatBiz | November 13th, 2007 at 9:58 pm #
I’ve been thinking about this strategy for a while. My blog is about 2 months old, and I had written some interesting posts in my first two weeks that got very low traffic, because the blog was basically unknown. Your post confirms that I should check that out, thank you.
PatBiz
Marko Novak | November 14th, 2007 at 7:12 am #
I noticed how you use word SEO once in every paragraph
Nice.
frank vitetta | November 23rd, 2007 at 4:25 pm #
Hi there,
I thought I could let you know about our new SEO plug in for WF.
So far, UTW plug-in users had to manage tags manually. Bloggers had to add appropriate tags to every single post. What if you have got thousands of posts? Would you rather assign tags manually or automatically? Have you got that kind of spare time on your hands?
WordFinder plug in has been build on this new functionality, it automatically generate keywords and tags for the page and for the meta data. Optionally on the “write and edit post” page, when bloggers click on tags, they get added to the category list.
Not happy with Wordsfinder suggestions? You can add, remove, manipulate any keyword or tag. On the option page, bloggers would be able to limit the amount of tags retrieved by wordsfinder. Leaving them 100% in control.
Download and test the freeware http://www.wordsfinder.com/wordpress.php yourself.