How to increase Page authority of old blog posts

[pks333]

Hi,

How can I increase the page authority of old blog posts?

There are many posts that are ranking well (Page 1 lower or Page 2) - but I want to make them rank higher by making the post more usable, better UI, design, content relaunches etc - these all would inherently mean improving Page authority also eventually.

What are some concrete steps I can take to improve page authority of blog pages?

[VeroBrain]

Hi,

Good question. Besides the obvious, getting good and relevant inbound links, you might set internal links, from pages with good PA to the ones that you wish to boost.

Although, linking must be done to highly related content. Otherwise, you could damage your pretensions by increasing the bounce rate as well as offer a poor user experience for your visitors.

You can get all data related to the PA's by using the Open Site Explorer

Mª Verónica B.

[MikeGracia]

Veronica (my keyboard doesn't do accents I don't think! Lo siento Veronica!) gave a good answer, I just wanted to add...

With internal links, if you're using WP or another CMS platform, there are plugins that do 'related posts', 'top posts', and even 'top comments', all of which could, in theory, send extra internal link juice to the pages. Though, many of these plugins would return the most popular/recent etc, not necessarily the pages you want

An approach I'd consider is manually finding posts that are related to the posts you're looking to give a little boost, and see if it'd make sense (from a content perspective) to link from any of the related posts you've found, back to your target posts. You may want to use an in-content link, or could even add a small 'recommended post' promo area - within or under the related post.

• Also, as you publish new content, remember to internally link to the target posts where it makes sense.
• You've mentioned content relaunches, did you update the last-modified meta (if it exists) or last-modified header?

Can the on-page SEO be improved at all? When you get to the first 2 pages, small improvements can yield results, so:

• Can the standard SEO be improved? (Go back to SEO 101, check things like filenames of images on the page, alt tags, what about subheadings? do you use < strong > when you could use < h2 > or < h3 >?).
• Page load times - can you optimise the images to increase load speed? What about page bloat (CSS/JS from old plugins - cleaning that will help the entire site!)
• Structured data - can you add any Schema markup? (article etc)
• Click through rates from SERPs... Can you improve the title tag (careful!) or meta description to try to get a higher CTR from the SERPs? As you get closer to the top, this gets more important (in my opinion/conjecture not fact)

That's all I can think of off-hand.

[VeroBrain]

Hi Mike,

Great! Do not worry, I know about the issues with the Spanish accents.

You are absolutely right. Your answer is very complete, with all the options available.
I have only mentioned, the cross linking, assuming that all the other options were already tried. Which might be not be true nor the best option as a start. Specially if the practitioner does not have experience enough.

Mª Verónica