It is really surprising how many posts your can accumulate on a blog over a relatively short time.
By the time you have been writing for a couple of years you may have well over 300 posts. The earlier ones perhaps not written or set out in the way you like now. After a few years blogging experience you will have grown and matured where your writing and website knowledge is concerned. Perhaps it is time to give some of your older work a make over. This also gives you the chance to still put our regular content while working on some new articles/stories.
Improve your Older Posts
You blog in general will benefit from this as search engines like to see a post has been cared for. It is true. They know when a post has been updated and are more likely to get their bots to crawl the article and then it may feature in searches. Older, forgotten posts are neglected by you and left by the wayside by Google.
I wrote about how to update or republish your older content in this post…
In the above post I suggest you may like to look at these points when updating or republishing an older post-
- Check all the text and correct any mistakes.
- If your content is less than 800 words write some more.
- Add more opinion or a change of opinion.
- Check out all the links and make sure they work.
- Add some internal links pointing to your newer work where appropriate.
- Delete all or some of the comments, that for various reasons are not relevant to you anymore.
- Do some work on your SEO – perhaps add some more images.
You may also want to consider these things when updating or republishing…
- Check the tags and categories. Perhaps you have created more since you first wrote the article and the older post would fit nicely with some of the newer tags or categories.
- And perhaps you want to convert an older post to blocks. Some of the features in this editor are more attractive than the classic editor (which I love BTW).
- Check out some of the latest memes and if an older posts fits, carry out any updates, add the badge and link it up to a new audience.
NB: If your post is over two years old it seems to also appear in the WordPress reader if you republish.
Update or Republish?
Up to you. By republishing you may well get more new readers but I would not do that unless the post is a couple of years old. The embedded link above goes into more detail with regards to republishing older content.
Revive Old Posts
Another thing you can do to help keep older posts alive with the public is use a plugin which will tweet your content now and then. Many of us use the plugin Revive Old Posts to do this. It is easy to set up and you can tell it how often you want it to pick a post to Tweet. I usually don’t get it to tweet more than one a day as otherwise your twitter follows may get tired of your timeline. I do get consistent traffic by using this social media plugin though.
That’s it – the moto of this post is – be nice to old content and it may repay you for your kindness 😉
Header image from Pixabay(adapted)
In the past year I have “recycled” a lot of older posts, and redirected them to their new place on my blog. It’s great to see those old stories again, and improve them with all I have learned over the years, especially about SEO! Great post, May!
~ Marie xox
This is something I desperately need to do as many old links and pictures no longer work correctly. I also noticed that spaces, extra spaces between paragraphs or pictures, are not showing properly either. I’ve had it in the back of my mind to do but really need to schedule it and make it a priority.
Rather than systematically going thru them all I would start with a couple you know were well liked at the time. And see how you go from there 😉