Blog posts are tricky. Sometimes, writing a well-optimized
post will land you views for many years down the
In
June of last year, I
wrote a post on how to schedule tweets after death. I was really happy with
it. The picture was custom-designed by the honorable Steven Rosenbaum of SR-Graphics. The topic was fresh.
The
post was well-written. Livefyre’s interns
shared it in their own feed. Death with Dignity had me
as a guest for their live Twitter chat. And best of all, I got to share
thoughts with interesting people about an interesting topic: what social media
can do to help us communicate and what that means for our mortality and experience.
Out of curiosity, I Googled “tweet after death” last week to
see where it came up. Articles from CBC, CNN, ANC, CBS, RT and a wealth of
other media with strong sites essentially wrote the same story and knocked my
article to page 2. (To be fair, one of them had quoted me).
I was grumpy about it. Here I had this innovative idea
months before any major media and I was getting shoved to page two. I wanted to
climb back onto the first page and stay there.
So I started sending out tweets with the post. I circulated
it again in Google+, Facebook and chat boxes. I sent it on to colleagues,
hoping that a little traffic would help push the thing up. And it did.
Exactly two ranks. Yay!
I realized that what I was doing was the last element of SEO
for blog posts. While most people optimize their post before publishing, very
few people optimize down the road and see if they still have their spot in the
search rankings. Everyone PRE Publish Optimizes, but nobody POST Publish
Optimizes (PoPO).
Here was an opportunity, and not just for regular monthly
SEO campaigns, but for true strong outreach for a new concept. PoPO is a chance
for SEO firms to rerun old blog posts in a chance to boost them in the rankings
and retake ground in strategic fashion so as to own concepts in the mind of the
blogosphere.
And when a post becomes too old to be relevant, the internet
will have seen an era when old posts become less relevant and algorithms knock
them down a peg or two. Then, PoPO will become even more essential, as the only
way to control key SEO ground will be to swim through a sea of content and
prove the relevance of your own over others.
From here, the water remains murky. How do traffic bumps and
links to previous posts affect the long-term search rankings? This is the first
mystery of PoPO. Without any data, it’s hard to know how you can help or hurt
your blog and by how much with each action.
And, even more importantly, the Google algorithm is subject
to updates that rearrange search rankings. To that end, PoPO’s future is
uncertain. On the other hand, what is fairly certain is that reminding people
of past posts as a way to keep traffic stored up may be an effective way to
boost visibility.
What I like best about the concept is what I like best about
most effective, worthwhile business tactics: finding resources others aren't using and capitalizing on them. PoPO is a chance for you to get amazing results
while leaving your competitors in the dust.
About the author:
Daniel
J. Cohen is the Founder and Lead Writer at RedShift Writers, a Houston-based
content writing firm. RedShift Writers prides itself on creating content that
is friendly for both search engines and customers. They offer a wide variety of
message strategies and content writing services and specialize in web writing
for product launches and energy companies.
To find out more about PoPO and how you can get the sharpest PoPO tacticians working on your SEO strategy, email RedShift Writers today.
To find out more about PoPO and how you can get the sharpest PoPO tacticians working on your SEO strategy, email RedShift Writers today.
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