By

Tweaking Your Older Blog Posts To Optimize Them Further!

I know, like many webmasters you must be already familiar with many of the techniques of optimization; but are you making the most of them?

Every conscientious blogger follows the complete rigmarole of creating a blog and having a number of quality posts on the blog. They ensure that everything is SEOd, see an initial flurry of SE traffic after the posts are indexed; then shift their attention to the next blog.

Optimize Blog Post

Is that how it works?  How many of you go to your analytics account after a period of time and check the visitor stats for the older blog posts.  Do you go back and see if anything can be done to improve the ranking? Well, you should!

To continue getting targeted traffic to old er posts, you must work on those individual posts as well. I know this is going to be next to impossible if you have several blogs with thousands of posts.

However, search engine optimization is a continuous process and is more often than not about making small changes to parts of your blog; especially the posts that are probably being visited more than others and are ranking better. Optimizing the posts that are seemingly attracting more audience can have a noticeable impact on your blog and its performance in organic search results.

Determining the posts that need to be optimized

If you don’t already know, Google Analytics is a wonderful free tool offered by Google that can provide detailed statistics pertaining to all the visitors to your blog.

Analytics helps you track target posts, which in your case are your blog posts, and help you determine which posts are attracting more visitors. You can track each and every visitor coming from a variety of sources, including organic traffic coming from the search engines.

This gives you vital information to either optimize a post or not. You will know how many people are getting to these pages and if they are completing your goals on those pages.

We bloggers spend hours on end promoting our blogs in several ways.  We write for other blogs, comment on blogs, share our links through social media and do a whole lot more. After all this effort, it is a sheer waste of time and energy if we cannot keep track of where we are getting the most returns from and where to focus our efforts.

Assessing The Competition to Increase Ranking

Time to assess the competition! The reason for competition analysis is to do better than them and get a better ranking than them. If you are ranking #3 or #4, you would want to see what the #1 and #2 ranking competitors are doing better than you, and strive to outdo them.

Page Rank – The number of competitors should not bother you.  What you should be bothered is the strength of your competition. The top pages usually have a high page rank.  However, you are fortunate if the pages above yours on Google’s first page have a PR of 4 or less, as you will have a fair chance of knocking them off their pedestal and getting your post up there.

Keyword Phrases – Viewing the source code of your competitor is a great way of finding the keywords/keyword phrases that are being used by them. You can go to the source code of their page using your browser. If your competition’s pages are optimized, then the title and meta tags will contain the same keywords or similar keyword phrases. Scrutinize their pages to find keywords incorporated into the text, headings, page title, url, image alt text and hyperlinks of those pages. You are in luck if you find that their pages are not optimized, as all you got to do is optimize yours.

Linking – The next most important thing to look for is backlinks.  If some of your pages are ranking high, you would already know the importance of backlinks to your pages in order to rank well in the search engines.  But are the backlinks to your page enough? Why is your page not #1 on Google instead of your competitor’s page?

If you and your competitor are equally optimized for a keyword phrase, then it could be the backlinks. But where backlinks are concerned, it’s not always in the numbers; it’s also about the quality of backlinks.  If you notice that your competitor has fewer backlinks but is ranking higher, then obviously you will have to look at the quality of the links.

Look at the number of unique domains linking to that page. Four links from four different domains hold more value than all of them coming from the same domain.

While analyzing the backlinks of the competition, it is a great idea to find the sources for inbound links, to check who is linking to their page and how.
Notice the type of link, location of the link, the relevancy of the page linking to theirs and the anchor text used in that link. A little digging into the backlinks of the competitor’s page will tell you the whole story.

There are several tools that allow you to take a sneak peek at your competition; one of the most popular tools considered to be very efficient is Market Samurai.

Many top marketers vouch by Market Samurai as it helps with keyword analysis, competition analysis and even helps generate content for blogs.

On-Page Optimization

Even if your post title is enticing enough to attract readers, it is going to be found through the search engines only if properly optimized. Initially, when you publish your blog post, your title tag may match the title of your post. But once you start seeing some organic traffic and you are sure the post is doing well, it makes a lot of sense to go back to tweak your page title and optimize it further.

Here is what you can do to optimize your post:

Keyword phrase in the post title tag – Your post should have a unique title tag. Relevant keywords that appeal to the search engines are needed.  It goes without saying that going overboard with your keywords can have a negative impact, as the idea is to keep the title targeted while incorporating additional keywords.

Word order in the post title – See if the keywords are placed correctly in the post title. If needed, change the title to have keywords at the very beginning or closer to the starting of the title, which is where Google loves finding them.

Keyword phrase in description meta tag – This is a summary of what your page is all about, for the benefit of the search engines. Change it if you feel that can be made better.

Keyword phrase in the header tag (H1) – If you have not used in your previous posts, I suggest you do that now. This actually gives a lot of weight to the keywords you use in those tags, helping you with optimizing.H1 tags

Keyword phrase in the domain and page name url – This has been seen to act as a ranking factor with the search engines. If you have not done that already, you can include that too.

Keyword phrases in the content – Word the keyword phrases into the post.  Make sure they do not sound “spammy” and read well as part of the content, and not just placed there for the sake of using them.

Internal linking – Internal linking is one of the most important on-page optimization strategies.  This is because it encourages your visitors to stay longer on your blog by leading them to the different pages through smart linking. It can also help improve the ranking for your pages and posts.  Some experts say that it helps to use keywords in the internal link anchor text.

Here are some easy ways to improve the internal linking on your blog:

  • A sitemap helps visitors find what they are looking for. In WordPress, you can use a Sitemap generator plugin.
  • Using an FAQ page, you can get internal links to your important posts with the use of highly targeted keyword phrases.
  • Linking to similar posts helps your visitors find extra information.
  • Show links to the most popular posts in the sidebar.
  • Add links in the footer, making it easier for people viewing the bottom of your blog page.
  • Use text links in your new posts to the important and older posts in the blog.

Elements of Off-Page Optimization

Page Rank – Shows you what Google thinks of your pages.

Domain Age –The length of time your blog has been around is important. Finding the right domain name for your blog has become critical and older domains have more weight than the new ones. If you have a two-year-old domain and your competition has a ten-year-old domain; that may be giving them the edge over you.

Index Count – The number of pages indexed by Google makes a difference to your blog. You may not always find all your pages indexed, but it does help to work on getting as many as possible indexed, to ensure your visitors are not shown the door to your competition.

External Links – As we have seen earlier, backlinks have the highest weight in Google. The number of links to your pages matter as well as the quality of such links.  Using keywords in the anchor text of external links is considered to be important, along with a variety in link sources.

Social Media – The latest trend is to use social media sites for promotion. You can promote your older blog posts in the social networks where people spend huge amounts of time finding relevant content and sharing it with their connections. There is a good chance your links will spread and reach a wider audience, increasing visibility to your almost forgotten blog posts.

You can do other things like getting such posts listed in the DMOZ Directory.  Getting those pages listed in this directory helps and it is completely free. It would be great if you can also work at getting some .edu and .gov backlinks to your posts, as they carry a lot of weight.

First, work on the on-page elements as they are completely in your hands. They can make a difference in getting you to rank #1. Once you are through with on-page, get on the off-page optimization bandwagon.

If you have a blog post that is ranking well but can do better, then you should by all means fight this SEO battle, if you wish to take it to a higher level and see a huge increase in organic search traffic.  If you are not on the first page of the search engines, they you might as well not exist.  It has been seen that more than 80% of the search traffic click only on the first page of the search engine results and never ever go to the second page.  Of all the results in the first page, the first couple of results enjoy the most traffic.  Just think of your own search pattern when you search for something, and the picture will be crystal clear.

Overall, determining the posts that are doing well and are somewhere on the first page, and optimizing them further to gain better ranking is not going to be difficult if you follow all of the above; whether you are targeting Google.

However, ultimately what matters is your visitors’ perspective. After all, that is what counts in the end. Know and understand what your visitors see when they compare you to your competition. Find the strengths and weaknesses of yourself and your competition. Overcome your weaknesses and make sure what your potential customers see about you is better than what they see in your competitors.

Tags: , , ,

Written by

Usha is currently a freelance writer and internet marketer. She has worked as a freelance writer for many years and has been an active internet marketer for six years. Having worked in the health-field for ten years in a senior management position, her interests are varied. She writes on a variety of topics, which include business, management, health, tech and a host of others. She is also the author of an e-book on internet marketing, which will be launched soon. Her future plans include publishing a non-fiction novel.

Discussion 1 Comment

  1. WordPress › Error

    There has been a critical error on this website.

    Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.