Improve Your Blog, Revisit Old Content

Recently I have spent some time trying to improve the page views on my website.

Rather than trying to increase the promotion and links I have focused on the site itself, looking at how I could improve the content itself to improve SEO and increase the amount of pages each visitor views.

My goal with these improvements is to try to set up myself as a WordPress and Web Development ‘guru’, and to increase my subscriber list. So I am focusing on the people who read my website as opposed to trying to get new readers.

To do this I am analysing my Google Analytics logs and revisiting old content accordingly.

To show this is actually doing something worthwhile I have attached an image of my Feedburner stats. As you can see from my stats there has been a steady increase in subscribers since January 2010 when I started this experiment. This could also be attributed to the fact I have been writing and releasing a post pretty steadily, however I have not published anything in a couple of weeks and my stats are still increasing.

Revisiting old content is a very simple way to improve your website with relatively minimal effort. The main thing I have done is going back to old posts and improving them. There are a few different things I do with each post.

1. Edit – many of the posts are quite old, and my writing style has evolved, so I often end up tweaking the content to make it better. The tweaking is not just about punctuation and grammar though. I also tweak the keywords used in the article to improve SEO.
2. Update – many of my articles are about elements of WordPress or web design that were relevant years ago, but are now out of date – so I either bring them up to date, or I write an up to date post and link to it from the old post.
3. Internal Links – I’ve written a lot over the years, so it’s worthwhile going through old posts and linking to newer, relevant, posts. This will encourage people to move around the site (increase page views), and improve SEO for the newer content (increase inbound links).
4. External Links – besides the internal links you should check the external ones. In going through the old posts I have found a number of sites I linked to have either closed or changed hands or been redesigned and the content has moved. Updating the links to relevant articles helps build trust. In addition a couple of the sites I was linking to have closed and been replaced by splogs or domain holding pages (those with loads of paid links on) and I don’t want to give them my hard-earned page rank.
5. Images – another thing to think about is adding images. On my site it’s even more worthwhile as I now use post thumbnails, but decent photos are well-known for encouraging people to read more content.

This list is a decent size, but it’s the sort of thing you can do when you have some down time. There’s no need to spend hours (days? Weeks?) updating everything in one go. Do a post or two a day and I think you’ll be surprised how quickly you start seeing results.