Dust Off Those Old Pages for an SEO Boost

Chances are you have hundreds of them scattered across your sites or your client’s sites. Old pages filled with content that was written a year or more ago. Content that is still relevant and pulling in decent search engine rankings, but it’s never going to be in the top 5 because, well because it’s old! However, just because something is old doesn’t mean it can’t be used to help boost your rankings. Smart SEO companies know that sometimes the easiest way to rise in the rankings is to reuse, recycle and reword!

The good thing about quality content is that it’s pretty much always going to be relevant in some form or another unless it deals with cutting-edge products or events. Otherwise, content that provides valuable information has a habit of sticking around out there. I’ve had a piece I wrote about 5 years ago dealing with supermarket layouts still rank in the top 10 across all the major search engines.

The good thing about old content is that with a little bit of work (a lot less than developing totally new content) you can easily have your rankings move up a few notches and even break into the magic top 5. How? It’s simple:

• Update your old content. Sometimes just adding an update to old content can boost your rankings considerably.
• Re-work the content to be SEO friendly. Chances are if you wrote your content a few years ago it wasn’t taking advantage of modern SEO analysis. By rewriting content to fit modern SEO practices you can get a nice little bump.
• Re-use the URL. This works well if you run contests or have seasonal pages on your site. If you have a URL that ranks high, but is only used occasionally, find a way to use it more broadly. Don’t let a valuable ranking get away!
• Freshen up those links. Sites come and go, and chances are some of your older links have gone the way of the dodo bird.

Now that you have your content refreshed, you may find you run into some difficulty resubmitting it to content crawlers and engines. The problem is that they look at the URL and go “Woah, buddy, you already submitted this once!” The trick here is to use URL tricks like adding a “#” or a “&” sign to the end of the URL. They won’t do anything to your URL, but it will make it look like a totally new URL to most crawlers.

Sometimes the easiest way to boost rankings is to use what you already have. By taking some time each year for your sites and revamping content and links you can give yourself an instant boost in the rankings at very low cost. It’s just another SEO trick that you can use to help wow your clients and keep yourself and your sites near the top.