Wednesday, August 15, 2012

How To Tweak/Recycle Old Blog posts for Better SEO



Recycle
I have said in my previous post on survival from Google panda that a newbie blogger starts his/her blogging journey in first stage of blogging and starts learning new things thus stepping to next level of blogging. They even learns to survive among various bloggers and write search engine friendly blog posts, but the very big mistake they perform when stepped to second stage of blogging is, they just neglect their older blog posts written while being a newbie which are out of taste, randomly written, not at all a seo friendly blog post nor a keyword targeted blog post. Tweaking the older blog posts of your blog highly boosts your blog's seo and adds value to them and thus to your blog. In this post I will be teaching you on how to tweak / recycle your older blog posts for better seo.


According to Google Panda algorithm, few number of low quality blog posts on your blog will affect your entire blog ranking as Google panda is a domain level penalty. You really have to spend few days or a week to recycle your older blog posts and remove some of them if it is found worthless reading. Suppose if your blog contains large number of blog posts then it makes a big deal where as if your blog consists of around 100-200 blog posts, you can surely tweak them for better seo results spending a week working on them. So what does the tweaking of older blog posts really involve??. Here is the certain conditions to be followed while tweaking them.

Tweak / Recycle your Old Blog Posts for Better SEO


Keyword Research

Each and every blog posts can be targeted to some keywords. Use some best keyword research tools like Google Adwords keyword tool and input few popular keywords related to your blog post and choose the best one out of alternate keywords. You can get better idea about keyword researching by reading my blog post on how to write search engine friendly blog posts.

SEO friendly Post Title

It's the post title that takes the first priority out of your blog post both in terms of users and search engines. Remove silly post titles and write a post title targeting the keyword you researched and your post title should be within 70 characters limit. Give your best time in writing a perfect blog post title and try to write post titles in how to form ending with a ? (question mark) or a top 10 list that attracts the viewers highly thus generating more CTR.

Post Meta Description

Blogger introduced search preferences option in the month of march 2012 and helped us to gain more control over our blog's SEO. Now you can write meta description for each of your individual blog posts easily and meta description is the second important factor that could grab the viewers attention in search engines. Give your best shot here and write a curious, attractive meta description for your blog posts and keep your meta description within 160 characters.

Post Image optimization

As you all know the blog post images are the third factor that is given more importance by a blog reader, Include a perfect and targeted image on each of your blog posts. Don't just grab the copyrighted images from Google search and always use your own images or use images of Flickr giving a image credit to the image owner. You can go through the creative commons license path in Flickr and search for images under suitable license thus saving your time. Don't ever forget to add your targeted keyword as the alt tag to your blog post images.

Post Words count

Don't blame me for mentioning this in many blog posts:), your post word count is an important seo factor considered by search engines and Google panda or certain algorithms. Its quite true that the blog posts with more words count grabs the highest place on search engines. Writing a blog post of atleast 600 words count is a best practice and writing a blog post of 1000 words count is the perfect practice. A lengthy blog post will also helps you in keeping more density of targeted keyword.

Keyword Density

Keep the targeted keyword density to 2%-3% of the complete words count of your blog post. Less keyword density is not a good practice and more keyword density is considered spammy by search engines. For a better idea about this, suppose if you write a blog post of about 1000 words count, keep your targeted keyword count to 2%-3% of it i.e., around 20-30 counts. It doesn't mean that you use 20 repeated keywords count in a single paragraph!, your targeted keyword density must be throughout your blog post and must not be used inside 1-2 paragraphs.

Internal Linking, External linking and Broken Link check

Internal linking is the best seo practice in effectively passing the pagerank juice all over your blog. Always internal link your blog posts by linking the keywords in the blog post to certain related posts on your blog. Never tag your internal links as nofollow. Its a recommended practice to give dofollow external links to high authority and trusted sites. Nofollow the external links only if it is pointed to any un trusted or low authority site. If you have already inter linked your blog posts then make sure to check the links whether if they are active or dead links. Having more number of broken links on your blog also impacts on your blog ranking according to Google Panda algorithm.

Usage of Heading Tags

Always keep your blog post structure easy and a newbie must also understand the flow of points inside your blog posts. Even search engines highly expects the usage of heading tags like h1, h2, h3 inside your blog posts for better understanding of your blog post structure flow. You can however style these heading tags to make it understandable to users as I have styled the heading tags of my blog posts.

Assigning Labels

Labels of your blog posts are not just a labels farm to assign silly labels / individual labels for each of your blog posts thus keeping 20-30 labels on your blog. Labels play an very important role in reducing the bounce rate of your blog where as high bounce rate is one of the factor to get affected by Google Panda algo. Do you know how it reduce bounce rate??. Today each and every bloggers use some sort of related / recommended posts widget on their blog and these widgets fetches related results depending on the label of the blog post. A blog post labeled SEO must always show SEO related blog posts to keep the visitors flowing around your blog posts for a long time. So make better usage of labels and don't neglect it.

Keep an Eye on Grammar mistakes

Hope you understood this point. Making grammar mistakes is a very silly thing and spend a minute to read your blog posts after completing each blog post. Use proper punctuation and symbols on your blog posts, avoid writing non stop English paragraphs without a comma or full stop.

A Note on Permalinks

Blogger doesn't allow you to change the permalink of a already published blog. Never try to change the permalink of the already published blog posts and that definitely increases the number of broken links on your blog.

Conclusion

Following these conditions will definitely boost the SEO score of your blog posts and a blog post with these ingredients can never be affected by any type of existing or upcoming algorithms of Google. I have tried my level best to write this blog post in normal English keeping the layman English out of this blog post. Kindly let me know if your find difficult in understanding any of the concept explained in this blog post. Like or share this post with your social friends if you agree with this post. Take Care, Happy blogging pals:).

0 comments:

Post a Comment