How To Refresh Old Articles Of Your Blog ?

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Old articles are like old pillars of a home, which holds the base of your house. You can renovate them to make your home stronger but if you remove them without a proper replacement then your home cannot stand even for a single second. Similarly our old articles are the base of our blog and they also need to be either refreshed or to be replaced with a better article that can take its place. Internet is running very fast, everyday new bloggers are writing attractive contents and making the competition tough for the pro bloggers. So in such case if you are not refreshing your content then you are definitely going to loose a huge traffic from your site. Keeping your content fresh is not a very tough task and if you are keeping it fresh by updating them with necessary updates then you can again give the life to your old articles.

Refreshing article is also important because search engines also want to be updated with time and they also try to give the fresh and best results to its users. So keeping the content fresh has become a necessity for bloggers and for this we need a proper strategy. So lets discuss some points that you should keep in mind while refreshing your old articles.

Before we start discussing about the ways to refresh the old articles, we would like to discuss three important questions that might help you later in the article, these are:

• Why it is important to refresh old articles ?
• How to select articles to refresh ?
• What is the optimum time period to routine check an article for refreshment ?

 So let we discuss these questions one by one in brief:

Why it is important to refresh old articles ?

Refreshing old article is important because with the time everything changes, so if your article is about a service, tool or any other information then with time there is possibility that it might have changed over the time. So if your article is not meeting the current needs and requirements then it is of no use for anyone either it is your website visitors or you. Also an old article can increase the Bounce rate of your blog because if a visitor comes to your blog/website and doesn't find the matter that he/she is looking for, then he/she will quickly leave your site, which will result in a high bounce rate for your blog which is not good for your Google page rank as well as Alexa rankings.

Also Read: Why Webmasters/SEO Blogs Rank High In Alexa Rankings ?

How to select articles to refresh?

To select an article for refreshment, you should focus on few small things:

• First use any traffic monitoring tool like Google Analytics, Clicky, Piwik, Histats etc to check the traffic of different pages of your blog.
• Now in your traffic monitoring tool look for the old article that are receiving huge traffic. 
• Select these articles first because if they have irrelevant content or old information that is of no use then they will definitely increase your blog's bounce rate.
• Also these are the articles that are still receiving some traffic for you so keeping them refresh can also increase the chances of getting more visitors to your blog.
• After these articles, select the article that are receiving moderate and low traffic.
• Try to select low traffic articles at last because they require more work than the articles that are receiving good or high traffic. Also there is more possibility that these articles are of no use at present date. If that's the case then simply delete the article and make your website fast loading.

What is the optimum time period to routine check your article for refreshment ?

• You can routine check your article in every three months to ensure that if something changes by night then you do not loose much traffic. However if possible, try to check your articles in every two months.

Now we think we have discussed enough about importance of refreshing an article, selection procedure and time duration to routine check your article. So now its time to discuss the ways to refresh an article. Below are the following steps that you can follow to keep your content fresh and up to date:

Check Articles For Errors:

While refreshing an article, first check the grammatical errors, spellings mistakes because these are the mistakes that we often do. So if you are refreshing your article and giving it your valuable time then try to remove every possible errors from it.

Update Article:

This is the most important step in the process, update your article with any necessary details, try to make it updated. For example: If your article is about any tool and a new version of that tool is available now so update it with the details of the new version of that tool.

Add Few Extra Lines:

Try to add few extra lines in your article, and mainly focus on giving the keywords in those lines. This can bring the life to your old article.

Link Your Old Articles To New Ones:

As a blogger we keep writing articles on regular basis, so our article's directory keeps on increasing. So, look at your old article and try to track the keywords for which you have new articles. Link those keywords to new articles and also add few more articles links by giving also read, recommended articles etc. to reduce the bounce rate of your blog.

Link Your New Articles To New Ones:

This is opposite of what we have discussed in our previous step but it is also an important step. Try to link your new articles with old ones so that every article of your blog get some visitors and also it will help you to increase the number of page views of your blog.

Optimize Images:

As we already said internet is getting faster in every aspect and we all learn with time, so check out your old images whether they are too heavy or making your website slow. If this is the case then download those images and use a good image compressor to reduce the size of image and then again upload them to make your website fast.

Remove Irrelevant Or Old Information that is of no use:

Try to remove all irrelevant or outdated information from your articles and fill it up with the new and more detailed  information.

Share Your Article On Social Networks:

This is another very important step as it can also bring life to your old articles, once you update an article then share them on social networks. Since we all the power of social networks so we don't think we need to describe it. ☣

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