Should You Revise Old Blog Posts?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

(Source) Say you “accidentally” rank in the top 10 for a keyword—one you weren’t targeting, but are now getting some pretty nice traffic for. If you’re not already #1, I suppose, should you go back to that page and re-optimize it for this keyword (assuming it’s a keyword that you like and the page is relevant to it)?

It’s a question asked by Jordan at Marketing Pilgrim. I say no. Here’s why:

There are plenty of ways to market a blog post. First, if it’s ranking well then you know it’s got juice. You should already be a member of one or more social bookmarking sites. Ask your network (those you respect) what they think of you post. Encourage them to bookmark it if they believe it’s worthy.

Next, write some articles on the topic using the same keyword. In your author resource box link back to that specific post.

Another way to market that post is to revisit the subject in a few weeks and link back to it from your own blog.

Copy and paste an important phrase from the post to see if anyone has written about that topic in their blog. If so, go and comment on their blog and link back to that post on the subject asking readers for feedback. You can say something like this, “I covered this topic on my blog at www.domainname.com/specific-post.html and believe it is a worthy topic of wide discussion. I’d welcome feedback.”

Visit a few forums and comment on the subject, leaving a link back to that individual post.

Inbound links are a good way to add Google juice to a web page, even blogs. And anchor text is even better. By strategically marketing that specific post with anchor text and other inbound links from various places online, you stand a much better chance of pushing it further up in the rankings than you do by re-optimizing or tweaking the page.