Spring clean your blog

I have recently suffered through the dreadful ordeal of cleaning out my cupboards at home. Digging out the dusty relics of my past was fun at first, but by the end I had found enough crap and clutter to start my own junk planet. This gave me a sudden brain fart... I realized that the same thing probably happens with a lot of blogs.

So I decided to get my Mary Poppins on and “Spring clean” my blog!

Remove the clutter

• First I took a look at my keyword tags, and removed tags that had nothing to do with the key focuses of my blog or that I perceived to be out of the scope of possible search queries that I want to be found under. I also looked for un-necessary duplicated tags like “blog” and “blogging” and thinned these down to root keywords. Finally I looked for keywords with ambiguous meanings and gave them context, for example, “Tree” became “Tree View”.
• I Removed the “Share This” Widget from my side bar, as I now have a more streamlined Social Media sharing tool at the bottom of each post. 
• I removed my sidebar adverts, as they were getting lost in the clutter, and the adverts below each post stand out more.

Add some polish

• If your post look a bit bland consider adding a picture, I mentioned this in my previous post 12 Ideas to Revitalise your Blog, it really does make a big difference.
• Consider your template, it might be time for a new look and feel for your blog.
• Go through your old post and see if you can update any of them with new developments, while you are at it, check that all outgoing links are still working. I would not recommend removing old post unless they add no value and are totally off topic.
• Build some internal links by looking for post that relate to each other, and see if you can work in new content that references the other post with links to them.

Take a moment
Finnish off by taking a moment to relax and reward yourself for a job well done!