If you run a blog, it is very important to keep it up to date and cleaned up. Here are a few ways you can quickly “clean up” your blog.
- Approve / Decline the comments that are awaiting moderation.
- Clear your spam comment folder
- Clear your trash comment folder
- Remove any unwanted / expired pages that you may have set up exclusively for group giveaways that are no longer needed
- Remove any posts in drafts that aren’t needed or have already been published on another post
- Check the posts in your trash to make sure they weren’t put there by mistake and then clear your post trash
- Clear all expired links / banners from your sidebars
- Remove any buttons from your sidebar that no longer have working images
- Finally, does your sidebar appear overly crowded and chaotic? If so, get organized and remove any banners that aren’t necessary. If you need more room on your sidebars, text links take up a lot less space than banners.
In updating your blog, here are a few questions you can ask yourself:
- If you were a reader, would it be easy for you to leave a comment or find your contact information
- Is there a place where readers can easily find all your current giveaways
- Can readers tell how many FB / Twitter followers you have by looking at your sidebars
- Does your blog have easy to find share buttons so readers can easily share your posts on their social media sites
- Are you blog stats posted on your sidebar? More and more advertisers are analyzing your blog’s MozRank, Domain Authority, and Page Authority. You can find these buttons on http://
www.pagerank-checker.com/ Click MozRank, add your URL and hit the search icon. You can then grab the button coding for each one. You can also grab a matching PR button as well. You can check out my button set up on the bottom of my sidebar. - Finally, if you are on WordPress, are you using the latest updated version? If not, make sure to back up EVERYTHING on your site before you update to the next version.
Remember, readers aren’t as familiar with your site as you are, so be sure to make your blog as user friendly as possible so they will want to “hang out” longer. There are many other site updates that can be done, but this list will get you started if it has been awhile since you updated or cleaned out your site. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.
Photo Credit: www.organizationdesign.net