If you have a lot of old posts, like I do, I recommend that you take the time to expand and expound for more and better traffic.

I just looked at my WordPress stats and saw that this blog has 1088 posts (not counting this one). That's a lot of posts for a blog that's less than 2 years old. One of the reasons there are so many is because a lot of them are brief and don't provide a lot of information. The first 6 months of posts are more or less journal entries.

When I wrote "Rewrite, Republish and Redirect Old Blog Posts – Recycle Those Electrons!" back in November, I wasn't giving out bogus information. If you have time, I recommend you go back and read that article. The methods I describe work well.

Expand and Expound

I've recycled blog posts two times in as many months. The 1st time, I combined 2 posts into 1 and the 2nd time, I combined 5 posts into 1. Both times, I redirected the old URLs to the new URLs. Combining the posts allowed me to expand the information I presented and expound on the details.

You can argue that referencing the old posts has the same effect but it doesn't and I'll tell you why.

Focus on Keywords and Key Phrases

When you expand and expound using the methods I use, you gain the ability to focus on keywords and key phrases, both in the post title and in the post content. As I've mentioned a couple of times, my recycled posts ended up much higher in the search engine results pages (SERPS). In fact, the old posts didn't even show up in the SERPS.

Two days ago, I mentioned that you need to stay focused. Recycling old posts gives you the opportunity to do just that.

Backlinks

When you take the old posts and expand and expound on them in a new post, redirection ensures the backlinks still point to a valid URL. If you combine 5 old posts, like I did, and each has 1 backlink, you'll now have 5 backlinks that point to the new URL via the redirections. The backlinks don't disappear. On the other hand, if you fail to redirect the URLs for the old posts, and you delete the old posts, you lose the backlinks completely.

Simply referencing the old posts will work to gain some temporary traffic to the old posts, but that's about it. If the new post isn't as good, or better than the old posts, it won't help in the SERPS at all.

I can tell you from experience that the redirection method works better for the SERPS.

More and Better Traffic

At least once per month, I plan to take old posts and expand and expound on them in new posts. Again, as I've mentioned before, doing that as well as focusing each article on the main keywords and key phrases has enabled the traffic to this blog to grow consistently. I have no doubt in my mind that many are returning visitors.

The traffic that I'm receiving is better than the traffic I was receiving before. The search phrases that I see being used in my analytics programs are actually hitting the articles they should be and not the articles they shouldn't. When visitors are satisfied with finding what they're looking for, they're more apt to return without searching.

This is an amazing feat in itself considering that this is a personal blog, not a specialty or "niche" blog. My topics are all over the place. The reality is that it proves a point: You can expand and expound for more and better traffic, regardless of the kind of blog you have.

Every blogger has old blog posts (articles) that didn't receive the attention they deserved. You may not care about it, but you should. The older a post gets, the less likely it's going to be seen by anyone or anything besides search engines. Why not revive those old posts by turning them into new posts?

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I'm running the current stable version of WordPress 2.1. The things I'm going to mention work with this version but I don't know if they will work with earlier versions. If you don't have access to the files on your server, as you don't when you're not self-hosted, this article will not pertain to your specific blog. If you should decide to become self-hosted, the information may be useful for you at that time — so bookmark it for future reference.

I'm fairly new to the SEO arena, being as how I knew nothing to start with and know very little now. I am learning, though. As I have been implementing changes to make my blog more attractive to search engines, I have avoided changing things that would have a negative impact on the people I link to or on the ability to navigate around my blog with ease.

In this first part of the series, I'm going to focus on the .htaccess file for the Apache web server. This file exists for other brands of web servers, but I have no idea if they support rewriting.

Page Rank

Which page is your primary index page, your front page? Does it start with "www."? What's displayed in your browser address bar when you simply type in your blog like "domain.com"? Does it automatically redirect to include the prefix? What if it includes "www." and you don't want it to? I ask these questions because your blog is ranked separately for "domain.com" and "www.domain.com". When someone links to your website, they could use either of them and they would resolve on your server and they would reach the front page of your blog. You want your page rank (especially on Google) to be consolidated to one landing page. I did this recently because I knew it was hurting my page rank. Here's how you can do it:

After "RewriteEngine On" in your .htaccess file (which should be in the root directory of your WordPress blog) and before any WordPress specific code (starting with "RewriteBase /"), insert this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/[^.]+[^/]$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [R=301,L]

Edit the first and second line and make sure you remove the "www." if you don't want to use it for your blog. The third and fourth lines ensure that your domain ends in a trailing "/".

If you're not using permalink rewrites for your blog, here's the whole thing:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/[^.]+[^/]$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Make sure you have this working before you continue with the next part in the series, which I plan to publish tomorrow.