Bill Belew

This guest post is by Jackie Wills

Not many bloggers realize that you can increase Page Rank by revitalizing your old posts. For starters, it is important to have a proper linking structure connecting all your posts. Then as you write newer posts, the old ones are inevitably going to need updates or provide some background for the new post.

Search engines realize this, and their algorithms look for updated posts that are still relevant rather than something you wrote a long time back and haven’t touched since.

Let’s say you wrote a post about how internal linking helps to boost page rank.

Now you’re writing a post about how to revitalize your old posts to increase page rank. The first article is relevant here, and can be linked to from within this post. This new incoming link to the old post tells search engines that the old post is still relevant and useful.

So, now you know that new incoming links are one way to revitalize old posts. You can also update the old post content itself, so that it reflects the current situation or at least tells users where they can get newer information. You could simply add a link to the new post, along with one line explaining the update.

On this point, there’s a couple of ways to do this. You can do it manually, by revisiting old posts and adding links into the post to newer content. Or you can use a “Related Links” plug-in. This is a contextual tool that automatically lists all related posts under the main post content. So you don’t have to worry about old or new posts and manually updating them. The content will change dynamically as you write more posts.

You can optimize old posts to make them more focused on a keyword. This can be done by changing the title, and using the keyword within the page content a few times. Note that search engines may entirely drop a page if the subject matter and/or title changes too much. So, be careful when you tweak it, and do it incrementally.

Lastly, nothing works better than a few comments and a conversation going on below the post. It adds new content to the page without disturbing the actual post content, and search engines start pushing the post up the rankings as more and more comments pile up. It helps a lot if you have a “latest comments” widget so that the post gets incoming links from all posts on the blog.