Three Ways to Recycle Your Blog

By Julie Johnson | January 2, 2014

Sometimes we focus too much on the content, forgetting that we have to market it properly as well. Not only that, it is equally important to breathe life into your old blogs and check it’s health. A blog can become cluttered with dead content and links or depend on an out-of-date template.

What can turn your old blog to getting conversions?

Try re-gaining the link benefits you once had. Keep a constant check on the conversions and have compelling content from preventing the readers from leaving. Also, provide content that readers like to read about and capitalize on it. This may sound easy only in words.

1) Sidebar and Footer
You can add links, badges, and widgets to your blogs, but be careful not to distract the reader. You are here to keep your readers glued to your blog and also to get conversions.

A fully packed sidebar can distract your reader. If you let your visitor wander to your Twitter account, it is unlikely that they will come back to your blog.

Before you decide on what to add or remove, you must have the figures behind it. One way to do this is to use Google Analytics. Select “In Page Analytics” in the “Contents” section of your Google Analytics dashboard. You can now see where on your page activity is happening. Where people are clicking

Widgets can sometimes increase page load times, which is not good for your SEO or readers. Make sure that any element on your page does not distract the reader. If this exists, remove it entirely.

2) Old Permalinks
Sometimes you may collect a lot of dead links that you are not aware of when you switch blogging systems or moved blog posts around in any way. Dead links can be of two types: links to old blog posts on your own site and links to old blog posts from external sites.

The first kind are easily fixable. You can make sure all blog posts have live links to your other related content. The second types are those that have valuable links to your content from outside sources. These are the ones which can be problematic. These links can help your site gain direct referral traffic and become a hit with the search engines, but are getting wasted. You have to re-direct those dead links to the correct posts on your site or viable equivalents.

Use Google Webmaster Tools. This will give you with a list of all the dead links on your site. When outside blogs and sites link to old content, you lose out on a lot of opportunities.

If you have few problem links and get outside website owners to change their links, you will need to redirect the old links to the relevant content. If you are unaware with setting up a 301 redirect using your .htaccess file, ask someone to help you out with the same.

Make sure all inbound links go somewhere apart from the error page.

3) Posts with Image
Try to have at least one image with every post. If you have taken up WordPress, make sure you have a featured image on every blog post, and that the featured image links to the blog post’s URL. They give a visual break to the reader. Make sure your images link to something relevant, other than just a tab with the image. Remember that everything that reader clicks should be directed towards a conversion.

Also, have a useful title for your image, and always include alt tags for your images with relevant keywords.

Avoid using huge images for faster loading time on search engines and make sure you do not sacrifice on the quality of the image when you use large images.

You can now begin re-sharing those great old posts as you have images to go with them. The will even work better on social media sites.

Make Sure: