When a blog is started, often SEO is not of the top priorities. As a result SEO is neglected and then a lot of work has to be done later. This is harder when you have hundreds of older posts. The best way around this is to follow some best practices early on. Here are a three:
On page SEO
The best way to maintain quality content is to apply SEO to it after it is written. Do keyword research on the topics in your article and then try to apply related search phrases into the article. Use search terms in your headings subheadings and within the body. You can also modify the title to reflect common search terms. This way the link to the article will also contain the keywords, which is one of Google’s ranking signals.
Encourage sharing
Backlinks are still the most important method of ranking higher in search engines. One of the best ways to get backlinks is to make sure as many people see your articles. Encourage users to share the content with social sharing buttons and incentives. The more people that see and share your content, the more likely someone who has a blog is going to link to it. Incentives could be a free related pdf for those who share on a given social platform.
Market the content
This is a little more time consuming but has a high effort to reward ratio. Go to competing websites and find where they get links from. Contact those webmasters and ask them to consider linking to your article. This requires that your content is better than the one they are already linking to.