Blog Posts Are Not Written in Stone
Through the ages, the written word has become more flexible. The Ten Commandments were written in stone. Books, sales literature, print advertising – not quite stone, but not so easy and quick to change, either. In contrast, web writing can be changed in an instant. When it comes to SEO and your blog, it’s useful to keep that in mind.
A blog post written six months ago, a year ago, five years ago, can have SEO impact today. Here are 7 ideas for retrofitting your old content for an SEO boost. Can you think of others?
- Add ALT Text and captions to images, using keywords of course. You may not have given a great deal of thought to optimizing images on old blog posts, but doing so will help you stand out on image searches, which can be very important depending on the type of business you’re in.
- Change H1 Tags. H1 Tags are thought to carry weight with Google. If your old post titles are keyword poor, enrich them.
- Insert tags. When I started blogging in 2005, tags weren’t used much. In WordPress, adding post tags is now easy as can be – by adding them to old posts, you make it easier for visitors to find them when browsing. In addition, WordPress generates a unique web page which lists posts for a given tag. These tag pages sometimes rank prominently.
- Add a call to action on popular posts. Some of your old posts probably attract lots of traffic. Those posts are prime candidates to insert a sales message, a link to a landing page, perhaps an Amazon Associates book link. This is an area where I need to spend some time, and I’m sure I’m not alone.
- Add a footer message. The footer links you see here appear on several of my posts. The internal links to important static pages on my site are helpful, and the image supports branding. By adding a footer like this to old posts, you can give your important web pages a lift.
- Adjust keywords. Content optimization is a process, not a project. The language of business changes. We discover new, better, more relevant keyword phrases as we test and review results. If your old posts contain clunker keywords, swap them out for the new and improved ones.
- Insert H2 Tags. H2 Tags carry weight with search engines, too. Do you have old posts with large blocks of text? Add keyword rich H2 (or H3) Tags, and you will do better with Google – and your readers.
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Chicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting, and content strategy consulting.
Great post Brad. I think it’s like anything when we first start out, when developments occur we often carry out new things using new ideas. I think you are right, we should look at older thing we’ve done and adapt these to accommodate new techniques found to improve our blogs.
Jenny, You are absolutely right that this discipline applies to everything else. As additional proof, the idea for the post came to me as I thought about the industrial equipment I used to sell. Often, retrofits were available for a few hundred dollars that made an old machine perform well enough to make a new machine purchase unnecessary. Sometimes it does pay to live in the past!
Brad,
Given how busy the vast majority of bloggers are, and how challenging it can be from a time managment perspective merely to publish new posts on a regular basis, it can be all too easy to overlook the potential of older posts in terms of traffic generation.
I did not know about the point relating to heading tags and search engines. Interesting.
hey brad.
awwwwsome idea.
i’m always way torn between high-impact emotive titles and SEO goodies but retrofitting old stuff that duddn’t really get much face time just for SEO purposes is a mad cool idea.
really like your site all round. dope design and overall vibe.
keep well and in touch mate
alex – unleash reality
Alex, Thanks for stopping by. It’s definitely sensible to go for a catchy title when first publishing a post – brilliant titles captivate readers and search engines, but that’s very tough to pull off on a regular basis.
Great ideas, Brad! Going back to revamp our old content for SEO can only help make our blogs more search-engine friendly and thus that much easier for people to find. And that increased traffic, in turn, can improve our search engine rankings, gaining still more traffic. Very sound SEO advice for bloggers!
Hi Brad,
I’m new to your blog. GL Hoffman posted about you today on his blog. The name of your site, Word Sell, really caught my attention. I came over and am enjoying the ton of information and tips. I’ll be a regular. Thanks!
David Tinney
Hi David, Thanks so much for stopping by and the nice feedback. I’ve just been checking out your blog and you’e got some great insights for small business marketing – tips I can use, that’s for sure.