Should You Update Your Blog Posts After Publishing?

I’ve always wondered what other bloggers do when they publish an article – do they tend to consider it final when it goes live or do some people make changes later on?  Personally, when I publish an article I will make a return in order to respond to comments, but beyond that I don’t do a whole lot with aged articles after I’ve gone to press. Over the past few months I’ve made sure to include a link to a related article at the end of my piece, but that’s about it.

Modifying Your Articles After The Fact

Barry Welford of SMM Internet Marketing Consultants recently made a compelling case for making later updates in his piece titled, “10 Reasons For Editing Your Published Blog Posts.” Without rehashing all ten of his reasons, I encourage you to read his article to see how you handle your own blogging. It turns out that after finishing reading his narrative I realize that I do modify previous pieces on occasion, although not with the same degree of intention as Barry. Allow me to share with you four of Barry’s points that resonated with me.

You fix mistakes, don’t you? I like to think that I catch every mistake before I publish, but that isn’t always the case. I proofread as I go along, but I also do one final, comprehensive read through to make sure that what I wrote makes sense and that all words are accounted for and spelled correctly. Usually, it is one of those smaller words such as “an” or “and” that I get sloppy with. Not that I have a grammatical problem, rather I sometimes type faster than I think which means I’m bound to miss something – even what should be obvious.

Image Addition? I must say that I do not add more images to an article later on. On most blogs (such as this one), I’ll include one image with the article, while on my car blogs I’ll include as many as six pictures if the article is discussing a new product release. I understand that images can add SEO value to an article, so maybe I should give this some closer scrutiny.

Update Developments – This is a good one. If I update my html pages I use on sites not powered by WordPress, why not update my blog posts too? It seems that a policy that we web developers used to follow — update fixed pages as needed – should apply to our blogs. But for some reason it doesn’t, so we don’t. Hmmm….

Search Engine Visibility – This is important, but I also think we miss out on keeping up with it. How many times have you written a piece that rushed to the top of the SERPs only to slide back down over time? Perhaps we should pay more attention to who has surged ahead of us because I’m sure that it isn’t just newer articles that are pushing their way to the top, but updated information as well.

Update Or Perish?

With so many new blogs and websites launching daily can we afford to neglect our sites? It seems as if we are doing just that if we fail to take advantage of the opportunity to make changes later on, especially when those changes may have a positive impact on our readers as well as on our visibility via the search engines.

See Also — You Can Blog Better Than That!