Optimizing Old Blog Titles
January 17, 2009 by Jason
After blogging for a while you get a pretty good idea of the types of articles that will be popular with various audiences. For instance, social media love lists, how-to posts, and articles with a catchy title. A rush of traffic from StumbleUpon or Digg can be good for stats, but it usually wears off pretty quickly. To build traffic for the long term you need to also consider search engines, and optimize blog titles accordingly.
Most commercial blog templates (even free ones) are optimized for search engines, and typically rank well in search engine result pages (SERPs). But bloggers can improve their blog’s search engine optimization by writing titles that do well in search engines. As a new blogger, this was a foreign concept to me. I tried to write every title imagining it on the cover of a magazine, or as a newspaper headline. Occasionally, that worked well for the search engines, but usually it included too many off-topic words that diluted my ranking for related keywords.
So after blogging for about six months I decided it would be a good time to go back and retitle my first couple hundred posts in a manner that made them more search engine friendly. I almost immediately saw a bump in traffic as the old articles floated higher towards the top of search results. Some changes were minor, such as rearranging the title so relevant keywords appeared first. Other changes took more time.
Here are some tips I used to make my old posts achieve a higher ranking in the search engines.
- List keyword phrases first. Search engines tend to give higher ranking to titles with keywords listed first. Here is an example targeting “online banks” as the keyword phrase. Old title: “Your Money Is Safer At Online Banks.” New Title: “Online Banks Offer Safety With Higher Returns.”
- Try to minimize “stop” words. When you search for a keyword phrase in Google you will notice that the matching keywords from the title and exerpt appear in bold. The more bold words in your title, the higher you will rank (all other factors being equal). Try to work your titles so that you do not have to use many “stop” words, such as the, and, if, but, etc. Here is another example. Old title: “What Are The Best Green Jobs For 2009.” New Title: “Best Green Jobs For 2009.” Short and sweet usually wins out.
- Warning, do not change your post slugs (permalinks) for older, indexed articles. Post slugs typically appear just below the title when editing your article in blogging software, such as WordPress. If you go back and update titles to existing articles leave the permalink structure alone. If you change the structure, users will have to be redirected to your new article URL or they will receive the dreaded 404 – Page Not Found Error.
Like most writers, I like to think I got better as time went on (some would argue this point). If you are like me, you probably can point to a specific post and say, “Yes, this is where I really hit my stride.” Don’t abandon everything up to that point, because those old posts can still be optimized to bring you additional search traffic.
Photo courtesy of PhillipC
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Great tip! I never thought of doing this but it makes sense. And thanks for addressing the permalink stuff because I was curious about that.
What about those people who have blogger and others have linked to the older titles as those links will no longer work? This seems like you are starting over in a sense.
@Dawn, I haven’t been on Blogger in a while. Does it offer the ability to have a different post title and post URL (permalink or slug)? If not, changing the post title will affect links to older posts, and you don’t want to do that.
@dawn – I just tested this out with my Blogger blog and it does work. Once the post is published the name is set as far as the URL is concerned. If you go back and change the title of the post, it doesn’t change the original URL, so your links shouldn’t be affected. Great advice, I’m taking another look at my old blog posts!
One thing I would add (may be a little out of scope) is that I would give anything to go back and remove dates from my permalinks. I choose early on to include the date in the links for my posts. If you want to write long lasting articles, I think it is important to remove any references to dates that you can. I know that when I search on a topic, I will always choose to read one that is the most current.