Refresh your dead posts optimizing them for Search Engines with Wordpress 2.7

So you thought Wordpress 2.7 is all about the smooth looks and the cool icons, huh ? I did for a moment. But not too late, I found out that there are some nifty options available on Wordpress 2.7, that will make your life easier. I mean if search engine optimization for wordpress was easy earlier, it’s the next level now. Let me give you a little example.

Leveraging on your older posts and search engine optimizing them to the max !

If you check the Edit Posts are in 2.7, you get a listing of all the posts so far, much like the earlier version.

Now, with your Analytics program find out which were the posts that had maximum organic traffic. (Check Traffic Source > Search Engine > Google).

Well, if you’re a webmaster like me, you would’ve a good idea on those posts, which category they belong to and when they were published, at the back/middle part of your mind. (Right next to the Medulla Oblongata).

1 – Bring up the old / dead posts

Using the sort feature, quickly sort the posts to bring up the best ones that got the maximum organic traffic.

Now, you’ll see that there were many posts that you thought would get a good grasp on the search engines but did not. Fish them out. (All the other posts other than the best ones. These are the ones we are going to work on)

Now, click on the “Quick Edit” link right beneath the post title. (Hover the mousie on the post title.)

2 – Find out what went missing. Plug it in

Now, open the Google Adwords Keywords Tool.

Paste the URL to the Adwords tool. and click on “Generate Keywords Tool”

Now, sort the resulting list of keywords by clicking on “Appx Average Search Volume”.

Now, pick up the relevant keywords. (Obviously you don’t want to pick the most sought after one’s right on the top because they might not be worth).

3 – Fix the old articles, give them a fresh breath of air..err..keywords !

Now, go back to the “Quick Edit” menu and reformat your Title to a better one incorporating your Keyword suggestions from AdWords Tool. This could be tricky. So be very careful while editing the title.

Keep two things in mind.
i) The posts you are editing are not viewed many times as they are not getting search engine traffic. So there is no need to stick with those “Hey! Check this out” kind of titles.
”User Friendlyness” takes a back seat here. You are writing for the engines so be clever.

Example

Old Title – “Hey! Check this out now – A free tool”

New Title – “Free Keyword Research Tool”.

You might have written a user friendly title earlier thinking that you’d get lot of attention. But you didn’t. So it’s perfectly fine for you to roll back to the “Search Engine Mode” here.

Now click the “update post” button so that the changes take effect.

Summary

Essentially, we are trying to bring life to those dead posts in your blog (that were buried due to unknown reasons, despite the good content) by optimizing the titles with the help of Quick editing in Wordpress 2.7. (This was a procedure done early too, but without the help of plugins, it was hard to do. But now, the Quick Edit feature makes things easy for us.)

P.S – If you can do it, refresh the tags, meta data and keywords based on the Adwords Keyword Tool suggestion, and not just stop the exercise with Page Titles.