If you have dedicated yourself to business blogging for the past few years you will have accumulated archives that are rich in relevant content. Does a post only serve it’s purpose at the time it is written? What about the wealth of information that you have preserved in your archives? And how does Google view those older posts?

“A webmaster/blogger who pays attention to their blog content, updating and fixing old posts, is one who cares about their blog and their blog’s content. Google’s PageRank algorithm tests to see how often a web page is updated and the length of time between changes in a blog post’s content.”

So what do you do to make that old content continue to serve you? No doubt you know a great deal more about keywords and search engine visibility now than a few years ago. Use that knowledge to correct the “freshman” mistakes that you made when you were first blogging. Rewrite your blog titles, add keywords and put alt tags on those images.

Revisit old posts that received a good response when they were first written. Some bloggers feature “an oldie but goodie” post that appears on a regular basis. A category named accordingly can become an easily accessed route to your best work.Go through your old posts and weed out the dead links on those articles that you linked to that have since been moved or are actually gone.

Blog Herald offers several suggestions on how to make sure that your archived posts continue to benefit you and your readers.

• Create Your Own Top 10 List: Write a blog post featuring your top 10, 25, or 50 blog posts, honoring them as your favorites, most popular subject matter, or most popular for the year or month, creating a list directing readers to the old posts.
• Use Related Posts: Through a Related Posts WordPress Plugin or manually, add a list of related posts to the bottom of your blog posts, pointing readers to your old posts for more information and reference.
• Change The Title: If the post content is good but the title stinks, not attracting the attention you think it should, change it. You need to make another decision on whether or not to change the post slug, the URL permalink of the post, to match the new title. Few change the post slug, but do change the post title to make it really describe what the post is about and it may start attracting more traffic.

(source)

Tags: attention, blog, blogger, bloggers, blogging, blogher, Business, content, deal, Google, hr, im, IT, keywords, link, links, page-rank, pagerank, PR, rank, reader, readers, relevant, RSS, search, Search Engine Visibility, seo, sse, tags, tips, traffic, update, url, visibility, wordpress

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 6:44 am and is filed under Business Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.