As a blogger, one of the major issue to tackle with– is what to do with the old posts.
Due to chronological arrangement of posts, new visitors visiting your blog will check out your new posts on your blog, mainly the posts under the first 2-3 pages. So what will happen to the rest of the posts?
Unless you have that post SEO-Optimized and getting good traffic from SEO, the post is more or less likely dead. Social media might come handy, but only for a specific period of time. You won’t get a constant flow of traffic unlike SEO.
How to Rank Older Posts
Older Posts
As a blogger, one should care about every page and post of his or her website. Posts aren’t toilet paper, once used, should be thrown away (not look after it in proper sense). Who knows that one of your posts lying over the archives has a huge potential to rake in traffic?
And also, bringing out the old posts to the front will reduce the bounce rate and increasing the time spend by the users on the website.
So here we are with some effective ways to bring the best out of your old posts.
#1 Use Inter Linking Plugins
This is one of the best ways to bring your older posts in limelight. Plugins like nrelate and yet another related post are very popular and you will Infact see it in action in most of the top blogs such as shoutmeloud.
It helps you in interlinking your old posts with your new posts, helping you reduce bounce rate. You will usually see it below the post in the form of squares. The good part being the relevancy of the posts shown. Due to it’s positioning, each post gets adequate exposure and perhaps engages the readers with your website. And as each post is connected, it forms a loop.
#2 Make a Round-up Post
It’s one of the innovative ways to bring older the posts in front. Top blogs such as pro blogger often do this. You can do it on per year basis, month basis, week basis and so on. You can compile the best posts of a specific niche, drop a line or two about each one and publish it. Or, you can even publish like Top 10 posts of the blog for (past week/month/year) and so on. There are limitless options, you have to just find the one which suits you. You can also do posts like roundup tips for blogger and include it there.
#3 Interlinking your Older Blog Posts
It’s like a subset of the first point, but unlike that one we don’t use any type of plugins here. You just hyperlink some of the words of your posts to the older posts. It is one of the most preferred way to interlink and bring exposure to all posts of your blog.
Compared to any other posts, how-to posts have higher chance of getting clicked, so better hyperlink with them. You can use templates like this– ‘Also Read’, ‘Must Read’, ‘Further Reading’ and so on. If you don’t like plugins clogging your website, you can use these templates for interlinking.
Increase Rank of Old Blog Posts
#4 By Tweeting them
Though I have been quite against the use of social media, but there are some wonderful plugins to automate the process of bringing exposure to old posts through social media. Plugins like tweetify will automate the process of sharing your older posts to twitter. There are heck lots of options to modify it to work according to your needs. You can set the number of posts to be shared per day, time at which they are shared and so on.
Not only twitter, you can even share them on Facebook on such a scale to bring exposure.
#6 Update Your Older Post
As you know the world is changing, what you know might not be what it is today. Such as panda updates and so on. You can write a new post about old post linking it to the older post or update the older post with newer information and put it up on the homepage. The trust the users have on your blog, don’t ever break that. Breaking their trust will end you up in more problems as the readers will start assuming you as a fraud. Readers have a faith on you and your blog that you will provide them with up to date and correct information, nobody likes stale and incorrect news. And worse, it might even lead to unpopularity of your blog.
Another great way is to change the date and time of your post, so that it seems to be published recently. But take care, if you have permalink and date associated with it, then don’t change it. Moreover, do it like once in 1 month or like that, frequently doing that might bore your readers to see the same post again and again.
Great tips! I would also suggest that you re-purpose your old blog content and turn them into a different content format. For example, if your blog post is a written one, turn it into an audio file or an infographic so that you can reuse it in a new post for your blog. Here’s a link that tells you how to do it.
nice tips, i’ll try this 🙂