BlogHelper has put together a couple of useful posts on what to do when spring cleaning your blog. Read at total of 10 things to consider doing at Blog Spring Cleaning: 5 Baby Steps and 5 more things to do when spring cleaning your blog.
About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
What happened to timing your posts to be in season?
Incidentally, I think he should have included some material on blog SEO. Ex.:
1) Sort through your logs and find what keywords are drawing traffic. Use overture to find related keywords and mark down those you’ll target with specific pieces of content.
2) Check around your evergreen pieces and see if they have some keywords in the intro that could link to other pieces you want ranking in the SERPs.
Your photography blog, Darren, could link the word lens, in an intro, for example, to something on wide-angle lenses. The link being in the introduction reinforces its weight, while the anchor text reinforces the other piece’s SEO for the keyword “lens.” [Note: this also serves to increase page-views]
3) For those who don’t really read their blogroll, check up on blogroll partners. Remove links to blogs no longer being updated.
4) Move the javascript away from the top of your code, and move the important things you want spidered closer to the top.
Wow, I just wrote a blog post right here… Maybe I should save this stuff for my own SEO blog?
Personally, I do a lot of tinkering with my WordPress templates, so I have to add HTML validation to the list. No, it’s not usually a big issue; even the stricter browsers will fix your errors for you. Still, letting invalid code float around your blog is unprofessional. I’d say this is a big one for anyone with web savvy users who are able to spot that sort of thin.
Thanks for the feature, Darren.
SEO Montreal: Aiks, I guess this is where bad post titling comes into the picture. I was really just going on my regular maintainance run recently and thought it would be the right time to write something on the subject. In any case, SEO is something I should have included, especially No. 2 and 3.
Stephen: I do quite a bit of tweaking myself, and admit that validation is often something I forget. But I don’t really subscribe do the “doesn’t validate = unprofessional”. I’m more interested in the end product, i.e. cross-browser compatability, and some validation errors normally do not impact that bottom line.