Law blog tip – update old posts

Might seem contrary to early concept of blog being a journal of observations or activities, but there are cases where updating an earlier blog post is a good idea. You need not update the entire post, just a note marked as ‘update’ would be fine. In some cases this may be a link to a more recent post.

Picked up this tip from Jon Gale, who submitted the tip to ProBlogger.

For sites that deal with products or time sensitive information, it’s a great idea to go back and edit older posts to reflect new information.

For example, you may post when a product is announced and again when it ships. Search engine visitors might come to your first post in droves (perhaps it was linked to quite a bit), even after the product has shipped. Adding a small note that the product is now shipping, along with a link to your newest post is a great way to both increase page views and increase the satisfaction of your visitors.

This search engine concept is big. Search engines are indiscriminate in what they pick up – they do it by keywords and incoming links. An older post may get a lot of traffic when in fact what you were talking about in the older post is now updated in a more recent blog post. Just a link at the older post to your new post could help you and your readers a lot.

I never seem to have the time to update old posts but I should probably do so on some topics. It would only make this blog more valuable for lawyers and legal marketing professionals.