Spring cleaning isn’t just for your home. If you’re a blogger, it’s also for your blog and your posts. Much like our homes, blogs need a yearly “deep clean” to be sure the dust is gone and any small cracks in the facade are fixed. These tips on spring cleaning your blog can help you breathe new life into your blog and get you on track for the rest of the year.
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Spring Cleaning – A Deep Clean Your Blog Needs
The following tips serve double duty and are invaluable tools to help you keep your blog rolling along. Not only do these tips help your blog work better, but they also help you get more traffic and generally make you look like a Blogging Superstar.
Check Your Links
Although we always try to link to high quality sites, and thus sites that will be around for the long haul, it’s still a good idea to check the links in your posts once a year. A post with broken links makes you look amateurish and turns off readers. There are multiple tools you can use for this, but if you have WordPress, you can actually use a plugin called Broken Link Checker. However you do it, it’s important that you DO it . I just did this two weeks ago and noted 2 0r 3 blogs that were no longer in existence. Broken links are not good. They are off-putting to readers. Fix them or remove them.
Content is King, but SEO is Queen
Never forget that. You can have absolutely inspired content, but if your SEO is lacking, chances are no one will see it. Go back through all of your post for the year and double check to be sure that the SEO is up to snuff. This should be fairly simple if you already have a plug in like Yoast. But do it anyways. I spend about an hour a week consistently all year checking old posts. I have been blogging since 2009 so there are thousands of posts to revisit.
Pins Drive Traffic
A good image on Pinterest can do wonders for your traffic. So be sure each and every post has a high quality, Pinnable image to attract people to your site. Remember, that longer is better. Small, square, or worse, small and square images are not your friend. Although we are seeing a few changes that way, even so…the goal is pinnable images for longevity and traffic.
Give Those Older Posts Some Love
After you’ve done your spring cleaning on your posts, it’s important to get them back out there again. Use a scheduler – there are a few – to get your posts back out onto Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other channels too. Hopefully, the shine you put on your posts will deliver! I know I have a few posts that performed even better the second year than they did the first, especially where Printables are concerned.
Check Your Plugins
If you have WordPress, you already know the importance of this. WordPress is incredibly user friendly, but sometimes the plugins designed for it can go a little bit haywire. It’s important to check to ensure that all plugins are working properly, well maintained, and without conflicts during your spring cleaning. Check the date the plugin was last updated and maintained before downloading any new ones.
Get Those Categories and Tags in Order
Sometimes, we get a little impatient or lazy, and we don’t categorize and tag our posts properly. That is no bueno. Without those categories and tags, it makes it monumentally difficult for our readers to find our content within our blog. So go back and ensure that your posts for the year are all categorized and tagged. Too many categories is not good and tags should be specific too. Read this post on lessons at Mom 2.0 for some more about tags.
Spring Cleaning Gets Your Blog Fresh, Clean, and Buzzing
Of course the buzzing part can’t be guaranteed, but if you do a good, deep spring cleaning on your blog, the chances that your traffic improves increase by quite a bit. So get those Pinnable images in there, SEO your posts to the hilt, and get them back out there on social media. It’s a great way to help keep your blog fresh and ready for action.