How can I improve ranking and traffic of my old articles?

If your old articles are still relevant and valuable, then it will naturally get good traffic. However, Google gives some slight advantage to fresh posts and so it is possible that your old articles may not get the traffic it deserves.

Here are some tips to improve traffic to your old articles:

1. Review your articles carefully. Check for spelling and grammar errors. Correct all the errors. This will help in two ways: it will change the content and will make search engines think that the content is updated and it will improve the quality of your article/site.

2. Keep updating the information provided in the article. Over a period of time, some content will become outdated. You can update them periodically, which will help you improve their ranking

3. If you get lot of comments, that will keep your articles fresh in search engines. So, encourage others to comment on your articles.

4. Respond to all queries posted as comments for your articles.

5. Keep deleting all spam.

6. Keep linking all your articles in the blog. You can provide links from old articles to newer articles and also provide links from new articles to old articles.

These tips will certainly help you improve traffic to your old posts.

Merge all your old 'related' articles into one. Delete the small and non useful contents. Make sure you didn't leave any of your SEO rank in this process.

The best way to improve the ranking of your articles is possible by keeping them updated with all the new information. You must respond to the queries of the persons who comments on your articles. You must share the address of your articles or link it with the other new articles. The above described methods can obviously help you out to improve the rank of your articles.

It is very hard to do so but it is not impossible. If you have 1000 posts in your blog you will not get enough time to update each and every old articles.
But if you make routine to edit and update 1 or 2 old articles everyday than it will not be time consuming and also give you better opportunities in Search Engines. But you also have to be careful not to waste too much time in old articles and must concentrate on present trends to be in competition. You also don't have to waste time on articles which are too old and now not in trends.

For example : If you have article about Nokia 2310 Or Yahoo Messenger, No need to update that article because hardly any one use this mobile or go for any search query in search engines.

So updating old articles is good and search engines also like this but only give your time to articles which you think will be worth in future.