One of the goals that I have for this year is to increase traffic to my website. One strategy for accomplishing this is to refresh blog posts. Here are 9 different tactics I am going to use.

While listening to Darren Rowse’s Problogger podcast, there were two episodes prompting me to focus on refreshing my blog post. The first was Problogger 218, which focused on goals and Problogger 216, which focused on style guides.

When Rowse talked about goals, he shared that one of his goals was to improve his content on the web. Google recognizes improvements to websites with better search rankings. The better you make your content, the more Google rewards you. One of the strategies Rowse uses is daily he will relook at blog post created on anniversary dates. For example, the date of this post is 23 January 2018. He will review his posts for the 23 of January for each year he has had his blog. This helps to keep the content fresh. He will make adjustments to many things that I will be including in this post.

Rowse also discussed the creation of a style guide as a way to create consistency across your blog posts. I have started to build a quasi style guide to help improve my posts.

1. Categories

One of the first areas I fixed were categories. I had far too many categories, so I reduce them to four. My new categories include business strategies, reviews, business tools, and social media and web strategies.

As I reviewed each of my blog posts, I noticed that I had some of them listed in many categories. I restricted each post to only one category. Now I have four major buckets that I can plan blog post around. This makes it much more manageable for creating content.

Here is more guidance on blog categories:

“Most bloggers would benefit from using as few categories as possible.“ – How to Choose Categories for Your Blog

2. Titles

The next area that I focused on was titles. Problogger episode 216 focused on using a style guide to help control the look and feel of your blog post. One of the areas Rowse mentioned that grabbed focused on titles. He emphasized the importance of maintaining consistency throughout the blog. This means that your titles should be either all sentence case or title case, but you must choose one or the other. I noticed that I was not consistent and immediately fixed the problem.

Keywords can enhance titles. It is important that you apply keyword research as you are creating your titles. You want to write a title that will show up in a search. I will address keywords more in item 4.

3. Featured Images

Imagery is important for increasing traffic and engagement to your blog. It is important that each blog post has a featured image. The tool I use to manage this is a WordPress plugin called Featured Image Admin Thumb. This plug-in allows me to look at the list of blog posts to see if each one has a featured image associated with it.

See if the featured image is correct.

Because I changed categories and updated titles, I had to also update featured images for many of the posts. I use a unique color for each category to help differentiate between them.

My tool of choice for creating images is Canva. It was simply a matter of changing the color of the image for some of these images. I would go back to the image saved in Canva make the change and then upload it back to my blog. The Featured Image Admin Thumb makes it easy to update the featured image as I don’t have to actually go into the post. I can do it from the list.

4. Improve Use of Keywords

Another way to strengthen your blog is ensuring that you are using keywords. One tool to help you with this is Yoast SEO. This tool will show how well you are using keywords. It takes into consideration your title, meta description, blog post, internal and external links, and images. Making this update to individual blog posts will take time because of the research involved.

“When you optimize your web pages — including your blog posts — you’re making your website more visible to people who are looking for keywords associated with your brand, product, or service via search engines like Google.” – Blog SEO: How to Search Engine Optimize Your Blog Content

Yoast SEO Keyword indicator

5. Readability

While reviewing blog posts, it is important to re-examine the contents and improve the readability. There are two tools I use to help do this:

• Yoast SEO – Yoast SEO provides suggestions for making your post easier to read. Suggestions include the size of reading blocks, a reading ease test, use of passive voice, length of sentences, etc.
• Grammarly – Grammarly examines the blog post for grammatical and spelling issues. When I started writing the blog post I was not using Grammarly. As I have gone back to examine different posts, I am quite surprised by the different issues that Grammarly and Yoast SEO are identifying. You should definitely be using these two tools.

Yoast SEO Readability Indicator

6. Increase Internal Links

One of the goals I have set in my Google Analytics is to track the number of people who visit 3 or more of my pages. A strategy many individuals including Rowse have recommended is to increase the number of internal links between blog posts.

Yoast SEO, once again, comes in handy. On the blog post list, there are two columns showing how many internal links there are to and from the blog post. It is easy to identify which posts need extra attention with internal linking. The logic is by linking to other posts on your blog, you can increase the amount of content an individual reads.

Yoast SEO Internal Links Indicator

“Strategic internal linking is an SEO power technique, especially for content marketing.” – The Seven Commandments of Internal Linking that Will Improve Content Marketing SEO

“Googles uses links to find out what content on your site is related and what the value of that content is.” – Internal linking for SEO: why and how

7. Pinterest Images

Pinterest images are another way to increase engagement with your site. A new tool that I have installed makes it easy to add Pinterest or pinnable images to a blog post. This tool is Social Warfare. You can add a pinnable image separate from a featured image.

Adding Pinterest images with Social Warfare.

“Pinterest drives more traffic to websites than YouTube, Reddit, Google Plus and LinkedIn combined according to new research.” – How to Use Pinterest to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog

With Social Warfare, you can see how much social traffic is coming to each of your blog posts. You can also create embedded tweets in your content.

One of the tasks ahead of me is to review each post and add a pinnable image.

8. Video

Another way of increasing engagement on the site or making your content more interesting is to include a video. Last year, I started adding videos to my web posts. In some cases, videos provide the content for the blog post. In other cases, the blog post will provide a catalyst to the video.

By creating a video and putting it on Facebook and YouTube, you can drive traffic back to the original blog post.

“Combining YouTube videos with your written content can help you stand out from your competitors.” – How to Improve Your Blog Posts With YouTube Videos

9. Broken Links

The last area that I will focus on as I refresh blog posts is fixing broken links. To help me with this, I’ve installed a WordPress plugin called Broken Link Checker. It provides a very nice report showing the broken links. It also provides you the ability to repair the broken link right from the list. You don’t have to go into the blog post itself. Additionally, it will send you an email when it discovers a new broken link.

Broken Link Checker results

Tools

Here are the tools that I use to refresh blog posts.

• Grammarly, a grammar checker.
• Broken Link Checker, a WordPress plugin to help maintain broken links
• Social Warfare, a WordPress plugin to help provide social media sharing to add peanut below images and to add tweetable content.
• Featured Image Admin Thumb, a WordPress plugin that allows you to see if blog posts have a featured image and allow you to update the featured image.
• Yoast SEO, a tool that will help improve SEO by managing keywords and internal links.
• Canva, an image design tool.

What strategies are you pursuing to improve your social media presence or website? If you have questions about anything I have shared, please ask and I will try to help you figure it out.

Additional Reading

• Key Components for a Business Website
• #SMMW17: Google Analytics: How to Measure What Matters for Your Business
• How to Find Broken Links with Xenu

In the spirit of full disclosure, this is an affiliate link, which means that if you purchase this item through my link I will earn a commission. You will not pay more when buying a product through my link. I only recommend products & systems that I use and love myself, so I know you’ll be in good hands.
Plus, when you order through my link, it helps me to continue to offer you lots of free stuff. 🙂 Thank you, in advance for your support!