Blog Spring Cleaning Tips and Tools – Part 2
This next batch of “spring cleaning” tasks will take a bit more thought, study and consideration. These’ll likely be more work and time than the pretty straightforward ones mentioned in part 1, but well worth the effort, I think.
Reorganize Your Categories and Tags
With categories and tags being pretty easy to generate on the fly, if you’ve got a busy blog, there’s a good chance you’ve got a bunch of categories and tags you no longer need. From those that contain only single (or very few) posts to redundant categories and tags to misspelled ones, etc., they sure can pile up. It’s also very likely that you have two or more categories that you could combine into one, or have categories that would make more sense as subcategories of others.
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The goal is to simplify and make it easier for your visitors to find what they’re looking for. A huge mish-mash of categories and tags does not meet that objective… not with the typical rush-rush-rush visitor anyway. When there are too many options, they just leave.
So, take some time now to clean up and simplify your categories and tags.
I’ve been using a WordPress plugin called Tag Managing Thing to help out with tag reorg’s (it works with categories too). If you do decide to use this, be very, very careful. Backing up your data files first is critical. This is a very powerful tool, and it does not help that the interface is a bit buggy (due to it not being upgraded, I think, for a couple of years now). Workable, but not for the nervous. (Leave a comment, please, if you know of and can recommend a functionally similar but less technically intimidating alternative).
Review Your Blogroll and Linkroll
You’ll want to check your blogroll and linkroll for…
- dead links (of course) or radical changes (new domain owners; completely different content, etc.)
- relevancy; is the blog or site still worth linking to?
- reciprocal links (if you participate in reciprocal link schemes); make sure they’re linking back to you.
While you’re at it, add some new blogs and links. Can’t hurt to tell them you’ve added them too.
Review Your Advertising
You should be doing this constantly, not just once a year. If you haven’t yet, now’s a good time to start.
If you run AdSense, check to see if you can improve on the current ads you’re running. Can you place the ads in better locations? Are there new ad formats you can try? Is Google still feeding you ads that match your content?
The same kind of “optimization” goes for any ads you run and promote as an affiliate. If things are already going great, I say don’t mess with them. But if there’s room for improvement, again, check location, for fresh marketing material, or even for new/better affiliate programs to promote.
If folks pay you to run their ads, check for new “ad space” locations you can sell off or new advertising schemes you can implement (such as text links within your posts). You may even want to review your ad rates.
…to be continued…
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