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12:32 pm November 12, 2012
| MoneyBeagle
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| posts 1466 |
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With my blog over four years old and having gone through two migrations (one to Blogger and another back to Wordpress), I am trying to put in some time to clean things up. I thought I'd get some input from fellow bloggers on things that might be important or not.
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!
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1:32 pm November 12, 2012
| Edward Antrobus
| | Fort Collins, CO | |
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Regarding images, it would be better to download the images and host them locally (and then link back to the original for credit). That way you won't loose them in migrations. Plus they will load faster.
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.
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5:50 pm November 12, 2012
| MyJourneytoMillions
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| posts 1012 |
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MB,
As you go post to post make sure meta data is filled and read the yoast seo guide
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3:54 am November 13, 2012
| MoneyBeagle
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| posts 1466 |
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MyJourneytoMillions said:
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.
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12:16 pm November 13, 2012
| Eric J. Nisall
| | Coral Springs, FL | |
| Member | posts 377 |
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Don't worry about finding articles that are "related" for linking. If you mention a topic in an article that ties back in any way to another, link to it using those keywords as anchors. Even if you need to do a long-tail phrase, use it. Deep-linking keywords will be much better than a plug-in that rotates old posts with matching tags.
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.
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4:33 am November 14, 2012
| MoneyBeagle
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Thanks, Eric. Lot of that is a little over my head (embarrassed to say, since I should probably know all that by now) but will research. I want to learn all this but want to make sure I'm going after the right knowledge. This will help for sure!
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5:38 am November 14, 2012
| Eric J. Nisall
| | Coral Springs, FL | |
| Member | posts 377 |
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Trust me, I'm no expert, but I got into that mode recently to try and get ahead of the PR update and stop hemorrhaging link juice. I went through every post and set each link in the image credit to nofollow, as well as examining my page speed insights to see what needed to be done to raise my score. That lead to a crapload of reading on optimizing images on top of the stuff I already read on interlinking posts and pages in order to maximize my seo efforts.
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5:56 pm November 14, 2012
| mbhunter
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| Member | posts 198 |
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If you want to be totally depressed you can run Xenu Link Sleuth on your site to find the broken links.
That, and check them all manually to verify that the site haven't been redirected to something distasteful.
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12:44 am November 15, 2012
| Untemplater
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| Member | posts 400 |
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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.
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4:26 am November 15, 2012
| MoneyBeagle
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| posts 1466 |
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Untemplater said:
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.
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10:38 am November 29, 2012
| TB at BlueCollarWorkman
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| Member | posts 81 |
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I do my own related posts linking manually. And sometimes I go back through my archives to old posts and add little internal links at the bottom "Update to this post!" kind of thing. But I do it mostly for the readers' benefit. Not so much for SEO or whatever. It's nice to try and keep things clean so that everything works nice for readers.
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10:42 am December 6, 2012
| seedebtrun
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| Member | posts 327 |
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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.
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1:33 am December 7, 2012
| DARRELL
| | United States | |
| Member | posts 14 |
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I used it..It's looking nice now. Visitor can easily track similar contents. Thanks for sharing.
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6:26 am December 7, 2012
| MoneyBeagle
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| posts 1466 |
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seedebtrun said:
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.
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