How far back do you need to optimize your blog posts?

[Scratch_MM]

We are going through a clients blog history as they are entering a redesign phase for the blogs.

We are trying to determine how far back we need to optimize past blog posts so that they can be found easier on search engines.

Is it better to optimize the past years? 2 years? 6 months? only the top posts?

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[SEODinosaur]

Hi Krista,

If the old data is useful to users I would update all of it. If the old data is useless to the users I would create good new data and optimize the newer posts.

Now when you say optimize... are you referring to just adding links to the existing content? If so.. I would also be careful having a bunch of links pop up all at once will not look natural : ) If all your doing is adding some links I would not do it all at once... Space it out, maybe do 1-3 a day..

[William.Lau]

Its really tedious but it will be all of them. But if you don't have the resources, just go over which SHOULD be more popular. Another could be selecting the ones that are already ranking on the bottom of the SERP and just needs a little boost to get to the top.

It could be tedious because just because your SEO a page, it doesn't guarantee 1st page rankings. Lets say 7th page to 4th page will not do much of a difference. But if it is to 2-3rd page to 1st page, you will definitely increase the traffic.

Its all a matter of whether or not the page will actually rank. Otherwise, it will be pointless.

So again, my suggestion is to optimize the better ranking pages that aren't at the top yet.

[gcdtechnologies]

Hi Krista, as Donnie says (assuming you don't have the time/resources to optimise all posts), I would optimise all posts that are still useful. If an old post has "evergreen" content, it's probably worth optimising. If the post is outdated or time sensitive, it probably has limited value at present and therefore would be a lower priority for optimisation.

I would delve into the Analytics data and see what posts are ranking well, what keywords you are ranking for and what type of content visitors are most interested in. I would also perform a quick audit of all blog posts to decide what their primary keyword would be, whether they are still useful, what sort of traffic they are receiving and their priority for optimising.

Good luck!