Editing old content for SEO

How old are the articles....you are talking about? Although the best way is to write fresh content which would be good for the readers as well as for the ranking of your website.

I do it all the time, for a few reasons.

1- To fix grammar and spelling mistakes!
First, English isn't my mother tongue (as you can see from my full of mistakes post), and even though I live in the US, I have never used any formal education to learn how to write in English. So, I learn with trial and error as I go along. So, every once in a while I go back and find new errors.

To be honest, the very first time I went back, I saw things that was really embarrassing. Simple things like capitalizing the "i" (where you are talking about yourself), or leaving space after comma. I used to miss all that, because in my language (Persian) grammar is totally different.

So, the good thing about my blogging venture is that I have improved dramatically when it comes to writing. And I think even if English is your first language, you can still learn new things as English is very fast changing language.


2- Improve over all SEO
Another reason I edit my old posts is to improve on page SEO. You see, when I started I was clueless. So, just like language, I learn new things as I go along. So, I go back and fix things. And it does help with the ranking often times (though on very small scale depending on the keyword, competition, etc).

3- Adding new terms (to posts) people use to search and find posts
The third reason which is kind of related to the 2nd one is that I have started using "SEO Search Terms" plugin. It shows you (right in your WP dashboard) what keywords and phrases are being used to find your posts on the search engines.

Now, you can make it so these terms show up on your live pages under posts, but I don't like that and I think it looks spammy. So, when I see terms that I haven't seen before, I try to go back to the post and somehow incorporate them in the actual post if possible. And in almost every case, I have seen improvement for that term in the serps. So it is worth it.

I usually do this with terms and phrases that are sounding natural and come up repeatedly.

However, you have to pay attention to where your posts rank as well. Sometimes after you change a post, it moves up the serps and sometimes it moves down. So, you have to pay attention to these things.

When I have a high-ranking post that ranks very high, and gets good traffic, I save a copy of the original post before changing it, so if in case it loses its ranking, I can go back and restore it, which will help it gain its previous position in a few days or so. Having said that, I don't think grammar and spelling fixes will have much of an effect when it comes to that.

Those are the reasons why I edit my old posts.

I do the editing in all of my web pages frequently so that the crawler can visit again and again. And the best part is I get the success.