Applying SEO to History Pages
Or "Why I re-wrote my History pages".
In my success with SEO I was finding that there were a large number of pages that were attracting Impressions (but not that many clicks). I concluded that a possible reason was that Internet users were searching for local residents names and there could be a potential for confusion when results were found associated with tempusfugit.me.uk.
Having edited a lot of these history pages I was finding that there were actual visits from those that only could have been interested in my content. This is because I had removed/censored the names of the local residents. I even saw clicks and the user following other links on my pages that they had accessed and not just that the visitor was looking for "dirt".
SEO
The thing here is to take my time! When I see a visit to a page that appears to be from a search I make changes to that page and make a request for re-indexing. As this is a long-term project there is no hurry to re-submit the pages as the number of visits are not that high at the moment.
The analysis of the visits is similar to a word game, you know what page was visited but you don't know the search terms and even what the person who clicked on the page was looking for. The visitor could have found a match with something that is on the page but nothing of great importance to that page. I seem to have minimised the visits from those looking for local names.
An example is my page on The Black Death. There was a follow-on visit to my page on Sir Robert Swynborne and the Tenures Abolition Act - 1660. The problem was that the Robert Swynborne page was in the old format.
A lot of the pages need to be re-formatted and/or content re-entered. The quotes need to be in the correct format.
The real use of SEO on these pages
Observing visits and seeing where visitors go on the website.
Menu items can be added to the top expandable drop-downs as the visitor finding the page is unlikely to find those menu options as they are likely to be mobile users.