WordPress Article Optimization Content Development for Oldies!

I have developed some great WordPress Article Optimization Techniques for those old WordPress articles.  Since I started using the Scribe SEO plugin in conjunction with All in One SEO plus (New for 2011) the InboundWriter freemium service and SEO plugin, these techniques have gotten even better.

There are a few content development principles at play with this exercise:

• Plan to do the content development work yourself.  You know the topic and the business better than anyone.  Save yourself money and get it right the first time.
• Spot the old WordPress articles that need to be optimized
• Look at those articles like an editor knowing everything you know today about the latest in SEO lore, SEO plugin tools, Copywriting services or  tools like Scribe SEO and InboundWriter, which gives you real time feedback as you write an article.
• Then Optimize your articles!

General Content Development Principle – Revive and boost up old WordPress Articles by dotting the new i’s and t’s that exist now

For example, once upon a time WordPress did not have a tag capability.  There were Categories, very hierarchical, but no tags.  When the day came that tag functionality was added, many people with hundreds or thousands of posts, just started tagging their new content, not having time for their old.

It may have been practical at the time.  If I hadn’t started using Scribe SEO in early 2010 and InboundWriter during the fall of 2011, I probably still wouldn’t be able to capitalize on the ROI of optimizing old content, but now you can become an effective content development guru and do a lot more while you are optimizing that old stuff.

So now is the time to Revitalize!

There are a few simple, but amazingly effective initial steps you can take.  These will require about a minute per article.  More time can be spent if you come across a really good old article, but for this lesson, we’re just covering this FIRST level of old WordPress article optimization techniques.

11 Steps to WordPress Article Optimization to channel your inner Content Development Guru

1. Old WordPress Article Optimization Identification – Find your articles that have no tags – Pretty easy, you can probably start by going to your oldest articles and working your way forward!
2. Keep track of the articles that you have optimized with Scribe SEO – Also easy as articles that have been optimized will have an SEO and Copywriting Optimization score.  Alternatively, use InboundWriter to identify articles that haven’t been scored.  It also keeps a percentage score for each article that has been covered.
3. Open the article to edit it
4. Copy the Title of the article into the All in One SEO fields for Title & Description, then add at least 5 more descriptive words in the description – Note if you have the time and see an opportunity for a rewrite or correction, Seize the Day!  Even better if you notice the old title, did not have good descriptive keywords at the beginning but did have them at the end of the title, rewrite that title!
5. Hit Update, and then hit the Analyze button for Scribe SEO.  Or if you are using InboundWriter add your 3 likely focus terms and kick the service off to analyze your article.  Make sure that all 3 focus terms are mentioned at least five times in that old WordPress article. Optimization is probably half way done at this point with a full sigma of punch.
6. Note the Scribe SEO score in your head or if you track it jot it down somewhere, but DO CLICK ON THE KEYWORDS TAB! 🙂
7. Copy and paste the keyword list into the All in One Keywords section and (If you are using InboundWriter, copy and paste each of the additional relevant terms into your keywords list separated by comas.
8. then grab the best of those keywords and
9. Paste them in to your WordPress Tab input box, and (This is a key tip for cross indexing those old WordPress Articles with SEO plugin tools like YARPP!)
10. hit ADD.
11. Hit Update to save your blog article again

That’s it you are done!  Sure there is more that you can do, but lets consider what we have just done in this first quick pass through old content.

We’ve completed the All in One SEO plugin fields to get this article re-targeted and focused for Search engine bots.  We’ve also updated the page, so your sitemap.xml file will now show a change the next time Google bot comes to your home page and this page will get re-indexed!

Furthermore, we’ve added a whole bunch of new Tags to the page which are hyperlinks, but also provide additional cross deep linking to our other pages.

If you are running the YARPP plugin or something similar, this might also increase your direct links to other blog articles that are related to this one, because this work will increase our relativity score.

Finally, we also have a baseline score for WordPress article optimization in terms of SEO and Copywriting optimization.  Later on down the road, you can reassess this article and determine if a little or a lot more SEO work is needed to really knock this article out of the SERPs park.  Later you can simply compare your articles Scribe SEO score and keywords with their Google Analytics results on keywords.  If they are scoring less than 80% and only on page 2 of Google (but not totally lost) you might want to put in the effort to take that 80% to 100% and move them to page 1 on Google.

Scribe SEO v InboundWriter Video First Look

To leave off on a humorous note, if you are curious about the difference between SEO Optimization and Copywriting Optimization consider the following SEO article title

In-House SEO vs. Out-House SEO

From an SEO perspective this article title isn’t half bad.  It has a rhyme and reason for mentioning the word SEO twice and even goes a niche deeper with keywords like in house.  But from a copywriting perspective the title becomes laughable as it mentions the word Out-House in a professionally based topic.

Out House is an old way to describe an out door bathroom.

You can have the right keywords contextually placed to increase your articles position in the SERPs but if your Copy turns people off then you are still missing your goals by a mile.