The "LinkWithin" Wordpress plugin is absolutely amazing at presenting 4 "related" posts at the bottom of everything that you post.. The articles are not always related, but the plugin posts the images associated with each post, and it looks very professional and great. We have gotten a ton of visibility to our old posts from back when nobody read the site, through this plugin alone.

 

Of course.. I think you are asking more from an SEO perspective.. And I doubt the plugin does much if anything for that.

I've seen that.  Unfortunately I don't have many images, it's never been something I've concentrated on. 

Question, for the related link plugins available, do the links there actually get picked up when Google (or other sites) are crawling your site?  My impression was that the related link info was dynamically created when the page is opened, so I wasn't sure if using them would actually get those internal links included.

Right now, I do have the YARP plugin, but I'm also going through slowly and just doing a cleanup of each post, a few posts at a time.  If I have related posts (which after 4+ years isn't too hard), I'm directly inserting some here and there, as well as some external direction posts. 

Of course.. I think you are asking more from an SEO perspective.. And I doubt the plugin does much if anything for that.

I do most of my related posts linking manually. I haven't really done any authority links though. I don't even know how much that helps.

Just like with anything else, there are those that have said it's worth it and those who say it doesn't matter.  Obviously getting a link from a high authority site is the best, but the rationale I've been able to put together is that if you 'give' a link, it still establishes a connection to those sites, which sort of brings you into the fold.  I'd also think that if you send clicks into those authority sites, that might get you favorably noticed by some algorithm. 

That, and check them all manually to verify that the site haven't been redirected to something distasteful.

If you're messing with images, make sure to use the alt attribute and captions if you can.  I've read that people actually read the captions more than the body text, and the alt attribute helps the SEs understand and index the images since they can't be read by crawling.

Like Evan said, make sure you have the necessary metas completed.  Keyword metas are worthless since they aren't used in Google (although Bing/Yahoo supposedly use them still), but something like having a unique, descriptive snippet is supposed to help in SERPs.

MB, 

 

As you go post to post make sure meta data is filled and read the yoast seo guide

Will do that.  I use the All in One SEO package and I've been going through and adding the info that ties back to that plugin.

As you go post to post make sure meta data is filled and read the yoast seo guide

I've never had a lot of luck with Related Posts. A lot of times, it can't find any posts that are related. Or it finds posts that have nothing to do with it!  I haven't done a great job of it with Edward Antrobus but for If You Can Read, You Can Cook almost every post gets linked to at least one other post I've written. Usually it happens along the lines of writing a line about peanuts and thinking "I'm pretty sure I've written about peanuts before, let me see what I can find." Then linking to a post about peanut butter.

Regarding authority links in old posts: maybe a compromise situation where you go back and add them to only your best posts. Buffing up a post that nobody has clicked on in a year probably isn't going to help it get noticed, but doing it to a post that is getting traffic still might help it get more traffic.

Here are some of the things I am actively doing or trying to implement:

1. Removing my manual footers - Wordpress has some plugins that will add a footer text (including copyright, RSS feed details, etc.) but I never put this on my blog, because Blogger never had this that I could tell, so I'd been adding the footer to each post, and kept doing that even after migrating.  I'm going through now and removing the footers from all of my posts, at which point I'll activate that plugin.  I should be done with that later in the week.

2. Cleaning up images - I've added images, mostly from Flickr (using the Creative Commons images) but two migrations have wiped most of the older ones out pre-2012.  Should I go through post by post and remove the links, or should I track down the images and put them back in?

3. Adding internal links - I have the 'Related Posts' plugin, but I know many people typically include a cross reference within their a post to another post.  Is there value in doing this for old posts?

4. Adding authority links - Similar to the above, I know many will include a link to Wikipedia or a news site.  Is this something I should go back for old posts and include, or just concentrate on doing this moving forward? 

5. Any other must-dos.  As I go through and clean up posts, I might as well incorporate any other best practices, so if you have any suggestions, I'd be happy to hear.

Thanks!