How to SEO Optimize Old Blog Posts to Boost Your Traffic

Optimize your old posts for SEO

You may have posted a lot of posts in the past few years that still receive traffic from search engines. Maybe you were affected by the latest changes to Google's algorithm and lost some traffic? Perhaps you've noticed that your site is affected by these issues. One question remains: How can I optimize my blog posts? The important SEO: Make sure your articles have been updated! Have you heard the concept of "evergreen content"? It's best to write content that's never become old, but it's almost impossible.

Everything changes very quickly, new technologies, changing programming languages change every day and every day! But you must work on them! While you can write new articles, or editing and updating posts that are good ranking, it's not better!

How do you do this? What tools can you use to make post editing easier and faster?

Well, let me point out some common issues to optimize old posts:

How do you update the content?

If you do not have a lot of posts, it may not be a problem for you, but if you've sent 100, 200, 1000 posts in the past, it's a bit harder. However, if you want to save time, you do not need to update all your articles, you need to look at Google Analytics (or any other means you use to monitor what number get traffic or what amount you buy website traffic now and in past and what is exactly your traffic) and see which posts get the most traffic. slow. Using Google Analytics, you can easily get this information as an XLS or PDF document.

Here are some easy steps to get your information from Google Analytics:

Because these pages bring the most traffic to your website (and usually these are not the latest pages), this makes it easier for you to update those posts and, of course, to improve the experience of your visitors!

A clear action list for optimizing old articles is as follows.

No. 1: Some Tips, Techniques, and Date Changes

There are different types of content, and each type needs a different approach, but let me summarize. Basically, you have two paths you can do:

1. The changes are small and in a matter of minutes you can update the post, and everything is fine

2. The changes are great and it's easier to create a new post on the same topic.

The first step would be very attractive because it does not take much time, but unfortunately, we usually must take the second path. We still need to update the information in the old posts that are not really the right one. In fact, it's better to write a new post just do not forget to connect these articles together.

Issue 2: Fix Corrupted Links

In your old posts, there are often some broken links that do not originate and cause the user experience to worsen. In this post I assume that you are using WordPress and with the list of useful plugins and online tools you can find broken links.

Link Sleuth checks the site for broken links. Verifying links on links, images, frames, plugins, backgrounds, local image, style sheets, JavaScript scripts, and Java applets. Shows a list of URLs that can be sorted according to different criteria.

This is the most popular browser to find broken links, but only for Windows.

Screaming Frog is my favorite because I am a Mac user. The program interface is a bit better and processing is very fast compared to other software.

Spider SEO is a small desktop application that you can install on your computer or Mac that searches for links, images, CSS, scripts and applications from the SEO perspective. It displays key elements of the home page for SEO, offers them in the sorts of tabs and allows you to filter SEO issues or compare the data through Excel to Excel.

The Checker link looks for links and objects issues on a web page, CSS. This is an option that you can use online, but data processing and results are displayed much slower. I guess you also want to have a WordPress plugin for this, so I found a very popular plugin that has just been updated with more than one million downloads.

This plugin will monitor your blog, look for broken links, and will notify you. I recommend that you use this plugin for general monitoring and link review, but not recommended for the process of clearing the old article. It has special features, but it's not good for our work.

Here you can find broken links in posts with this tool. Updating these links can take some time. This is a process that you must do.

Issue No. 3: Clean up comments. comments from spam

Well, this is a big issue - no matter what you do, there are still spam comments that even the best plugins cannot detect. I recommend posting comments in old posts, visitors would like to put valuable comments in new posts and you can drive targeted web traffic to your website through old post.

Unfortunately, after extensive research, I cannot find any plugins that can erase existing spam. I found a plugin that reviews existing comments but has not been updated since 2009. Some tips I suggest:

1. After 60 to 90 days, close the comments.

2. At the beginning of this post, I advised you to remember a list of the most popular monthly articles from the analysis results? Visit these posts in the WordPress dashboard and check their comments. Since they are the most popular pages, you'll probably find the most spam comments that are trying to hurt your ranking. Just delete highlighted articles from comments and links.

Well, while there are no good plugins for checking spam comments, luckily there are awesome plugins that do great things to make sure they're not spam! To make sure you do not get a new spam, you can improve the internal WordPress settings and use several useful plugins to take care of it.