Finding your blogging rhythm and SEO improvements to old blog posts

A big part of my work this month has been to go back and look at old posts with a view to look at SEO improvements, such as keywords, meta descriptions.  I am using the awesome plugin from Yoast SEO as a way of helping me with SEO improvements and to increase the amount of “green” on my posts, see below an example from one of my articles:

Since October, I have been producing a new post pretty much every week, so have I found my content creation rhythm? This is still nowhere near my manic content creation month back in September, where I managed to knock out 14 posts.   Unlike last month, traffic to my blog has actually increased, with 25% more user views and a bounce rate down by 40%.  Even though I have not been prolific on the content front I did not leave my blog to just sit there without doing anything.  So I focused on looking at SEO improvements of my old posts.  This involved changing the article keyword to be more specific (based on the article content and what people were searching).  As well as carefully crafting the SEO Meta descriptions (based on what other similar sites were using as article keywords).

I have continued to look into way of increasing organic search results by improving my SEO score, by adding my site to a number of directories such as blogcatalog.com.   Whilst carrying out my research I found an article by Harsh Agrawal who wrote a great article on how to share your website/blog on a number of directories.

Another highlight of the month was producing another piece on Personal Brand,  Are we ruining our children’s personal brand? Digital Culture gone mad.   I also added a ping list to my site so that whenever I update content on my site, a ping request is sent to all ping services which are listed in the ping update services section of your WordPress site.  This list of ping services can be found on Harsh Agrawel’s site www.Shoutmeloud.com.

• Getting a post on the first page of Google for my chosen keywords
• Users of my blog are now split evenly between new and returning visitors
• I also cleared out some old backup files
• Traffic for my the site has increased in all categories, the most satisfying was a 25% increase in users and page views up 60%, see comparison graphs below:

I am still slightly frustrated by the lack of more users (in larger numbers; 100’s rather than 10’s) visiting my blog.  This is definitely something I intend to keep improving on, but more importantly I don’t intend giving up.