Used 'wrong' keywords in blog posts, should I go back and edit?

[sea2dca]

I have a bout 70 blog articles spanning about 2 years. Because I hadn't done proper SEO research, I used the term I thought made the most sense when talking about my services. However now that I have done my homework, I realize that the term I like, is not actually the term most people use to search.

Very few of these articles are time sensitive and mostly generic best practice kind of stuff. I'm not talking about keyword stuffing, simply going back and replacing one poorly chosen keyword with one that people are actually searching for where it occurs naturally in the course of the article.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

[WesleySmits]

You could republish to blog posts wherein you use the new keyword in principle. What i think you should take a look at though are these two posts here on Moz by Cyrus Shephard.

They are about using keyword themes which is the way to go from now on. If you are thinking about editing blog posts this might be a good thing to start doing right away.

• How to Rank
• Keywords to Concepts

They are invaluable resources and define the modern and future best practices concerning keyword research and optimization.

PS: If you're going to update your blog posts you might also see if they could be made better in any way. Using rich media, is the content completely up to date, is there anything else that could be added to improve the article etcetera..

[sea2dca]

Thanks so much the answer and resources, the 'keyword themes', make perfect sense and actually sheds light on a few other concepts I was trying to understand.

As far as editing those previous blog posts, it certainly makes sense to update them so as to improve them and not simply focus on replacing a keyword. If I were to do the updating do you think there there are any risks in the engines seeing this update exercise as negative?

[SharewarePros]

Hello,

You can change your keywords at any time you want, taking these steps:

1. Modify the page title tag.

2. Modify the page description tag.

3. modify the content according the new keywords.

Take special care about perform this task in several weeks, because your traffic will drop, and will be increased in the time ranking for the new keywords.

Hope it helps

[sea2dca]

Thanks, that answers the question and you raise some good points... slow and steady versus a find and replace.