How To Optimize Your Blogs Most Visited Pages (day 7)

Fotolia 6388536 XS2 How To Optimize Your Blogs Most Visited Pages (day 7)This is day 7 of the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. Yesterday we spoke about the essential connections between your blog and your various social media sites. Today, Michael Martine, a close friend and leading expert on business blogging, talks about optimizing your most visited blog pages, which you should have identified on day 3.

__________

Are you leaving money and opportunity on the table? You might be if you haven’t optimized your blog’s most visited pages. You should know what the most popular pages are on your blog and look for opportunities to optimize them for better reader engagement and conversion.

What Analytics are For

This is what web analytics is really for (not just visitor counts). What is working on your site? What’s not? Analytics will tell you by revealing patterns of visitor behavior so you can make better content & conversion decisions. One thing nearly any analytics program will tell you is what your blog’s most visited pages are.

Take a look at your blog’s “top ten.” Are you surprised by which pages are the most popular? I hope not, because that means you’re having trouble matching your blog’s content to your goals (expect a couple surprises in there, though—let’s be realistic). For example, my analytics told me that one of the most popular pages on my blog is the post How to Add a Blog to a Website.

Because of this post, that exact phrase and its derivatives are common searches which land people to that exact page.†This was deliberate: it’s what SEO is for and why you should learn about it. Without the content there, no searches about this topic would ever reach me.

I know that’s really obvious, but I’m constantly surprised by bloggers who say their blog is about a topic… but then that topic’s keywords aren’t in the posts they write! If the words aren’t in the content, then that’s not what your blog is about (as far as Google is concerned) and your ideal visitors will fail to show up at your doorstep via search. The reason why I’m telling you this is so you can get your blog to the point of having popular pages you can take advantage of. That’s next.

How to Make Popular Pages Work Harder for You

If your blog has a conversion goal, you want to create blog content in support of that goal. Most blogs at least have the conversion goal of growing subscribers. If your blog is the marketing for a business or a non-profit, you need more. You should have an email list that goes beyond the blog. You may also have products or services to sell, which means you want to direct people to those pages.

Knowing that, you try the following ideas to make your popular blog pages work harder for you:

  • Keep updating and adding to popular posts to increase its value as the situation and times change. Every time you do this, send an email out to your list to let them know you’ve just updated and that you’d love their comments on it (I learned this from Michel Fortin). This will increase long-term traffic and backlinks to the page, which will, in turn, strengthen its authority in search.
  • Create a “best of” or “popular” links list on your home page. These always drive traffic. When a page is popular, we want to figure out ways to make it even more popular, because popularity leads to greater popularity. The long-term benefits of this are the same as the previous point on updating.
  • Write new posts that build on an older popular post. Not only should you link to the old post from the new one, you should also go edit the old one to include a link to the new one. Make sure you use the same keywords in for each in your post titles and in the anchor text you use to link them (anchor text is the words of the hyperlink). Why? so that you end up with a double indented listing in Google. And of course, this event warrants an email to your list (these tactics overlap).
  • Create a product around the topic of a popular post. This is what I did with my post about adding a blog to a website. I figured if people were searching on that keyword and reaching me, it would be a good idea to provide visitors an opportunity to get in-depth information for a minimal investment. The strategy has been a great success. I created an inexpensive ebook about the topic and updated the post with information about it and a buy button. I get sales every week.
  • Rewrite the headline and slug of a popular post. This one is a little risky, but can help you take a performing post and get it to perform even stronger for you. If a post is snagging searches for a keyword, you can often boost it by taking the important keyword and move it to an earlier word position in the headline. You can strengthen a keyword by making it plural or singular, whichever has more searches (this is where keyword research comes in). If you’re using Headway or an SEO plugin, you can easily separate post headlines from the slug, which is like the file name of the post. In order to do this without breaking any existing backlinks to the post, you’ll need a redirect plugin for WordPress (a quick search will reveal several). If you’re not using self-hosted WordPress, or you don’t have a redirect plugin, don’t try this.

Give it a Go

Homework: Go check out your blog’s most popular posts (after tweeting about this one, of course). Then try one or more of the methods above to make it work even harder for you.

About Michael Martine: Michael is the author of WordPress SEO Secrets and offers blog consulting at Remarkablogger to help you boost your bottom line with a blog. Thanks for guest-posting, Michael!!!

If you don’t want to miss out on the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media, please sign up here.

Rehydrate your inbox here. Send hate mail here.

  • momsdaily

    I think my problem is my site includes a blog, but is a component of a larger mission- hmmm, struggling with how to pull it all together.

    • http://www.johnhaydon.com John Haydon

      Think of posts as tools to create SEO and community. So the question is: How do optimize visits from search engines and engaged readers?

    • http://remarkablogger.com Michael Martine

      That’s exactly why I wrote How to add a blog to a website. Check it out, it should help give you some direction. :)

    • remarkablogger

      Figure out what your conversion goal is. What do you want people to do? Then you work backwards from that: what kind of content would encourage the action you want your readers to take?

      • momsdaily

        Thank you for this guidance, John sent me a link to your site earlier today, I am thinking I could use either your book or a coaching call to sort things out!

      • remarkablogger

        Oh, sure, tease me why dontcha? ;-)

        I look forward to either one! I said I was going to raise my consulting
        rates this year but I haven't gotten around to it, yet. My laziness is your
        gain while the getting's good.

      • momsdaily

        well then- let me book a call with you! Off to teach an online class tonight- hopefully that rate will still be good tomorrow :)

      • http://www.johnhaydon.com John Haydon

        MomsDaily – I would highly recommend hiring Michael. I've been working with him for almost a year and have seen huge gains in both my blog numbers and business numbers.

      • http://www.johnhaydon.com John Haydon

        Yup – what Michael said. :-)

  • http://www.diary4life.com Paul

    A great post and very informative. This is a great follow up to day 3, reinforcing a number of ideas and suggestions.
    Just one question; what does a redirect plugin do. Yes, I guess it redirects, but what does it redirect and where from and where to?
    Thank you for sharing.

    • remarkablogger

      Paul, if you change a “slug” in WordPress, any existing links to the old slug will now be broken. Not good, right? So a redirect (actually what's known as a “301 redirect” for a permanently moved file) tells incoming hits to go to the new address. A WordPress plugin allows us to create redirects simply, without having to script them in the .htaccess file on the web server.

      • http://www.diary4life.com Paul

        Thanks for the info. Does this work if you choose to change the structure of your permalinks?

      • remarkablogger

        Yes, that is one instance where people use a redirect plugin.

  • http://dannybrown.me Danny Brown

    Solid stuff Mr Martine (and great guest poster, John). I think this is one of the most under-used ways to keep your blog posts alive. So many bloggers leave the posts as is – but even just a little spring-cleaning go a long way.

    John, I notice you don't tag your posts – any reason?

    • http://www.johnhaydon.com John Haydon

      My tags are a mess. Doing some clean up as we speak…

  • frankdickinson

    Superb stuff – as expected – so delivered. Thanks guys!

  • http://www.netwitsthinktank.com frank barry

    Good point about writing new posts that spin off of previous popular posts. Coming from a different perspective or adding additional insight/information/how to makes all the sense in the world.

  • sue_anne

    Great post! I *hope* more people are beginning to really look at the analytics of what is getting clicked on and using that as a base to build on. If a specific blog is popular, you may be filling an information gap that you can capitalize on.

    • http://www.johnhaydon.com John Haydon

      Exactly. One thing I do is update most read posts to include links to pages I want them to visit.

  • Pingback: How to optimize your most visited blog pages | Socialbrite (new)

  • david365

    If you update/change old posts, how does Google see it? I use a plugin to only “ping” new posts. So as things stand will I have to deactivate this to ensure Google updates as well? Thanks for great post

    • http://www.johnhaydon.com John Haydon

      You mean ping Google?

      • david365

        WordPress automatically pings, or updates, sites like http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/ The plugin I use, “smart update pinger”, simply ensures the pings go off only when you post new stuff. I assume Google gets to re crawl your site via these ping sites (I'm showing a high degree of ignorance of the process here).
        My point is more general – some of my early posts are quite poor and I had considered updating in any case. Do you risk getting penalised for duplicate content as well.

      • http://www.johnhaydon.com John Haydon

        If you update posts, it doesn't create dup content. If anything, it would help SEO.

      • david365

        thanks, this has been useful

  • Pingback: Recent Acts of Guest Postery - Remarkablogger

  • http://www.bootoutlet.co.uk/ ed hardy outlet

    Because of life rhythm accelerated and working pressure increased so that people to pursue a relaxed, carefree mood in the spare time.They won’t suffer trend while seeking a comfortable, natural new packing. Just introduce some websites for you about natural new packing.you can go and see. Christian Audigier

  • http://www.cheap-boots-shop.us ugg boots

    Here elaborates the matter not only extensively but also detailly .I support the write's unique point.It is useful and benefit to your daily life.You can go thosetp http://wwww.cheap-nikeshox.com sits to know more relate things.They are strongly recommended by friends.Personally

  • http://www.bootsforcheap.us ugg boots

    “Well , the coach outlet view of coach handbags the passage is totally correct ,your details is really reasonable and you guy give us valuable informative post, I totally agree the standpoint of upstairs. I often surfing on this forum when I m free and I find there are so much good information we can learn in this forum!
    coach boots

  • http://www.loveshoppingshoes.com Jimmychoos

    That is a idea, I am agree with the opinions of this articles about