Practical Ways To Rank An Old Blog Post – White Hat Methods

Practical Ways To Rank An Old Blog Post: White Hat Methods

If you have been looking for a way to rank an old blog post using White hat methods, then you just stumbled on the right article.

With over 600 million active blogs on the internet, there are tons of valuable resources online for every niche.

Publishers race against time to create content (text & video) daily and upload it on the internet and this now makes the competition intense for new publishers and their websites.

However, the battle for the top 10 positions in the SERPs should not get you discouraged because new blogs on a fresh domain with high-quality articles get some of their blog posts ranked within a year. 

Ahref in a post revealed that 95% of new blog posts don’t get to TOP10 within a year, while a few could manage to get ranked in 2-6 months which is a probability.

Google ranks older posts that have built page authority over time based on content quality, aging, and some other factors. However, not all old blog posts rank well on Google SERPs, and this may be the case with your website. You possibly would have invested money to hire an experienced writer but are not seeing the results you want.  

In this article, I will show you several ways to rank an old blog post on Google and Bing and most of these have proven effective over the years.

According to a research post by Inter Growth, over 60% of online experiences start from a search engine. With that in mind, you can only imagine the fate of a poorly optimized blog post. Now, let us correct that.

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Key Highlights

🎯 White hat techniques have a lot more to do with targeting low competition keywords and sourcing for new traffic channels.

🎯 You can rank an old blog post by developing good content marketing strategies.

🎯 Search results from google images are capable of driving traffic to your blog.

🎯 Over 60% of online experiences start from a search engine and you should strive to feature in the SERPs.

🎯 A simple yet improved website design could change the way your visitors engage with your content.

🎯 Websites that practice grey or black hat SEO techniques may attract penalties from search engines.

SEE ALSO: How to Use the Keyword Sandbox Tool on SEO PowerSuite

SEE ALSO: 15 Best SEO Tools Perfect for Beginners Webmasters.

SEE ALSO: 6 Best WordPress Speed Plugins to Pass PageSpeed Insights Test

What Is White Hat Seo?

Just as the name implies, White hat SEO is the application of a set of approved content optimization methods that are legit and lawful in ranking text, audio, and video content on search engines.

White hat Seo is an embodiment of all the optimization tactics according to major search engines’ terms and conditions.

Unfortunately, some webmasters practice Black hat Seo which destroys search engine ranking efforts. Websites that adopt the Black hat methods may see some immediate boost in ranking, but in the long run, often do poorly as their success is often short-lived.

NOTE: If you will hire an SEO Expert, please scrutinize all the measures, tactics, and strategies they will use in ranking your website. This is important so as to avoid penalties and bring down all efforts you made at the beginning.

Let’s examine some of the White hat SEO tactics you can use on your websites to rank old and newer posts:

• In-depth keyword research.

• Using meta tags and meta descriptions on posts.

• Amending post titles with relevant keywords.

• Interlinking related blog posts within the website.

• Use images, and infographics with image alt text.

• Amend website template and navigation if necessary.

• Considering mobile optimization.

How Valuable is the White Hat SEO Technique?

There is no negotiation with Google when it comes to doing the right thing.

To stay away from the dreaded hammer from Google, it’s best to avoid any form of publishing malpractice.

There are many free and paid tools online that can assist you to follow Google’s approved SEO methods that will help you gain insight into what your competitors are doing.

These tools will help you analyze working strategies, see keyword gaps and difficulties, competitor domain authority, keywords & ranking pages, traffic volume, backlinking opportunities, etc.

For insights into basic SEO tactics, You can check out Sam Ahref’s video tutorial on SEO for Beginners.

It’s important to know that the White hat method also requires patience and consistency to see results. Once you are doing the right thing and following approved and legit tactics, you should begin to see results in 4 – 8 months of SEO work.

The White Hat technique is long-term, efforts at the initial stage will build momentum and pull traffic over time in a steady pattern.

For example, the image below shows a website that has a steady traffic growth pattern within 6 months (Jan 1 – Jun 1, 2022).

White hat SEO methods build consistent traffic on a steady path that is measurable and predictable.

SEO is better than paid Ads in the long term especially if your website is content-driven (and not eCommerce or Software). This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use both traffic-generating strategies.

While buying Ads, ensure you build your SEO alongside because that is the framework or foundation for your website when you decide to stop running Ads.

The White Hat Seo method is what publishing experts such as Neil Patel, the owner of Ubersuggest, and Spenser Haws of NichePursuits recommend and use to build their portfolios to 6-figures.

White Hat Seo Techniques For Ranking Old Blog Posts

In this section of this article, I will take you through the White hat methods that still work today.  

Keyword Research

Without any doubt, the use of low competitive keywords plays a major role in ranking fast. It’s a “hit or Miss” game.

The use of keywords cannot be overemphasized. It is important to understand how to use keyword variations (short tail & longtail keywords).

Short-tail keywords are much more general search queries consisting of one or two words, while long-tail keywords consist of three to five or even more words. So, it’s best to use a combination of both to see which works in generating traffic.

There are a number of both paid and free keyword tools that you can use to conduct keyword research in your blog posts.

One of these tools is the Google Keyword Planner. Though options like SpyFu, SemRush, Ubersuggest, Ahref keyword generator, etc, are available.

Google Keyword Planner is free and open for all users which means you can use it in keyword analysis.

Link Building

Link building is another White hat SEO technique for improving the Page and Domain Authority of a website which makes Google notice and sends more traffic to the website.  Link building can be tricky and time-consuming, many webmasters dread link building, and I do too.

In link building, there is always a thin line that separates the White hat method from the Black hat method, if you approach link building wrongly, you could get penalized by Google.

Many webmasters buy links these days, there are a lot of link-building farms out there with bad practices and if Google sees that your approach to link building is not natural, you could get deranked by Google.

To build links in your blog posts, you need to integrate links to authority websites naturally.

One way to do this is through Guest post outreach. Instead of paying directly for links, you can pay for an outreach agency to help you source quality backlinking opportunities.  One of such is Links Management.

This method gives your website a good rating by the search engine indexing bots and works towards improving your overall site rating.

If external websites with strong domain authority are not linking to your website, you could consider link building as a method to get strong websites pointing to you. Link building has proven to improve the performance of text or video content on SERPs.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most powerful strategies to rank any old blog post. Though it sounds like a difficult task that would require the hand of an expert, content marketing can be done by anyone who can increase social signals to a website.

Traffic from social media also makes Google notice the visitors that are engaging with your content. What Google does is send its bots to crawl and index your page, therefore, reducing the time it should have taken to get noticed. Content marketing is intentional which will help any old blog post and grow your website faster.

To optimize an old blog post for better performance, you must develop a content strategy for marketing the post.

The advent of promotion methods like email marketing has made content marketing easier. Thus, anyone can grow an audience and promote content to a target audience.

To support your blog post, you can consider creating complementary contents like videos or social media posts to spark targeted interest in your blog post. With the right social media strategies, you can also develop your follower base and influence your website and blog posts for better traffic.

Paid Ads

Though not organic, paid ads are one of the easiest and fastest ways to rank an old blog post. Using this method, you can boost your post to a target audience using the Google Ads service or any other post promotion service like Facebook Ads and more.

Unlike the other techniques on this list, using paid ads involves money. Thus, it is not a free technique. However, it is effective in ranking, as it exposes your post to a wider target audience, thereby increasing your chances of gaining more traffic.

ALT Tags

Search results from Google Images can also drive traffic to your old blog post. This move, of course, is only possible when you attach the ALT image tags to all the images featured in the post.

Aside from being an important factor to search engine crawlers, ALT tags also serve as image descriptions in cases of errors with page loading. See the image below of an ALT tag error.

General White Hat SEO Techniques For Blogs/Websites

Other than the outlined methods for ranking old blog posts, there are general White hat SEO methods that you can use to rank your overall website on search engine result pages.

Here are some of these techniques:

Consider Mobile Site Optimization

According to Statista, mobile devices account for up to half of internet traffic. With that in mind, you can confirm that optimizing content on mobile is crucial for ranking your website. Moreover, a large percentage of your traffic would be from mobile devices. Thus, a poorly optimized website for mobile would miss out on over 50% of its potential traffic.

Most web viewers are mobile users today, so search engines favor websites with good mobile optimization on result pages.

User experience and loading speed are key when it comes to website optimization. With that in mind, a good website design with a simple navigation interface would attract more returning viewers and boost your website’s reputation. To know more about mobile phone usage, check this mobile phone stats.

Add Schema Markup Tags

Schema markup is a method of structuring your website via HTML tags to give search crawlers a clue of the kind of information a particular post on your website contains.

Though neglected by many, working on the schema markup of your website can greatly improve your ranking on search engines, and it is acceptable as a White Hat Seo trick. Schema markup is similar to meta tags and website title descriptions.

However, it allows you to do more and further tell the indexing software about your website and post and all other social links connected to you, as well as the keywords you’d like to rank for and the texts you want to appear on search engine snippet desks.

Final Thoughts

From the tested method stated above, there is no doubt that there are many ways to rank an old blog post on your blog and your website as a whole.

Gone are the days when you need to hire only SEO experts to pull off such sophisticated Seo tricks. Today, anyone can optimize a post for better performance and even do it free online.

If you have been looking for the right White hat SEO methods to rank an old blog post, you can follow all the tips in this article. Also, these tips can assist in the overall improvement of your website rating, so they improve revenue and deliver value in the process.