Cleaning up old content and coming forward to let Search Engines know you care about your blog . The best ways to go shown here
A chore or a new start, it's your call
The first action is to tour your old pages and posts finding those that are obsolete.
You may have posted on Donald Trump being president however that is is the past, or maybe the future, but not in the next four years.
That is the sort of post that you need to make a decision on.
- Delete the post and forget it
- use a 301 redirect to the Joe Biden page
- Then a 401 to tell Google page deleted
- Or 410 to say page gone forever
Deleting obsolete posts is good house keeping.
Brocken link checking
We all have these and they affect your results. I use a Brocken link plugin that tells me how many I have at any one time and where they are.
One way around this is using a product like Pretty Links. Here you store all your links on the dashboard so when you want to change a link it changes every page or post.
Not only that it also records all traffic so you can understand how well the link is working.
Yoast SEO also has a great link checker on their service.
The meta description is also important
The meta tells people what your article is and is the first introduction to your page .
You can write your own Meta or have Google make one up for you, taking a part of the first paragraph.
The better this short description is the more readers you will get and hence more sales.
Again if your Meta went praising Donald Trump it is old material and needs to be up dated.
A meta description (sometimes called a meta description attribute or tag) is an HTML element that describes and summarizes the contents of your page for the benefit of users and search engines. … Your meta descriptions are important to you and to your SEO rankings.
Wordstream
You have about 160 characters, spaces and words to make your point.
This is an example of a good Meta description. You can see it has attracted a lot of visitors because it explains exactly what the reader wants.
Therefore it is important to keep these up to date.
Cleaning up old content and adding Video
Adding pictures, graphs and lists
One easy way to bring old material up to date is to make it look pretty. By adding relevant pictures, graphs or lists really helps a page jump out. Then of course you have colour to brighten up the day.
These are easy additions however they have a big impact.
Readers scan your writing looking for things of interest so a picture brings them to a stop
or pause to read more.
Your content is important
You can not ignore outdated content or even badly scripted work. Yes we all have days when we are not quite up to the grade particularly in our early work.
Sentences too long, paragraphs extended beyond three hundred words all make a difference.
Furthermore the use of headings and subheadings should be checked.
That is not to mention spelling and grammatical mistakes. You can use a product like Grammarly to make sure you are on track
Conclusion
Industry leaders put this first on their daily task list. Your post has age and maturity, relevance and position therefore you can only add to this and improve the results.
What is the most important thing to do? It will depend on what you originally did and what mistakes you made to easily update the site.
Finally Neil Patel, for one example, has a team working exclusively on old blog posts believing it will make a big enough difference to justify the expense,
