Blog clean up must be done once in a while. Some parts of your blog tend to be used over and over again, without realizing that some unsung heros behind it are actually gathering dusts because the last time you visit them is probably the day you set your blog up.

Photo by pedrosimoes7

Today I would like to share with you a few places of your blog that you might need to pay a visit to pump in fresh air to these places. These places won’t annoy your readers at large but you might lose some of your readers who entered your blog via other points rather than your main entrance.

Another reason for a clean up is to boost server loads. Every time your page loads, it might be slowed down by some "behind the scenes" elements which I will show you in this list as well.

10 Important Clean Up Sections For A Blog

Plugins

When we stop using a plugin or a plugin seems to be bugging our blog, we tend to deactivate it. Considering the fact that we might need to use the plugin in the future, we did not delete it from our FTP folders. The longer you blog, you tend to experiment and discontinue the service of certain plugins, adding more and more deactivated plugins to the list.

Since the introduction of Wordpress version 2.3, Plugins section in our admin panel will tend to have a reminder column under a plugin if we did not update the plugin to its latest version. Deactivated plugins tend to have such reminders as well if they are not updated, making the list long and messy.

Categories

Long categories definitely is not a good thing if you are blogging on a niche blog. Also, targeted traffic might be chased away when at one glance you offer something out of their expectation (unrelated contents). Cleaning up your list of categories will mean regrouping your posts, changing the names of the categories and deleting of categories.

Before you go ahead and modify your categories, be sure that search engines have not indexed your categories pages. You can do this by adding meta tags to stop indexing of such pages, editing the robot.txt file in your server or simply check the box "noindex for Categories" on the All-In-One SEO plugin (if you don’t have it on your blog, get it now!) options page.

Old Post

Posts in your archives might have covered historical events and you might want to link forward to later posts, update the information, correct minor but once undiscovered spelling and grammatical mistakes, recycle and make it your posts for another round or even delete it. Old posts have their own value and they might be the materials that assure new readers that your writings are worth subscribing or coming back.

Photo by rileyroxx

One thing about revisiting old posts and updating them is that you will pick up some inspiration of what to blog along the way. Resuscitating your old posts by putting in on the front page again like what I have seen on NothxEast can reduce the workload on content creation and capturing new readers with these old but useful posts is an effective method.

Links

Revisiting old posts will also ensure the outgoing links in the posts are in good conditions. Excessive broken links can have bad effect on a web page according to search engine experts. A link might be working alright at the day you give out the link but as time passes by, a site might be closed, redirected or moved and your links will only lead to a "page not found" page.

Internal links that are properly described with the TITLE tags can boost search engine keyword ranking position of the our blogs’ internal pages. We might once rushed a post and have ignored small bits like this.

Codes

Not many blogs, even my blog, Problogger and John Chow dot com don’t have a set of W3C valid HTML codes. This might not seem to be an important issue but it is argued over at Does W3C Validation Help In Search Rankings? that the validity of your HTML codes have some influence in your search engine optimization efforts.

You might not be able to understand everything when you run the W3C validator but you can always use HTML Tidy to help you see what some of your simple codes are supposed to be. You will learn more and more if you are willing to learn. If you are lazy, of course you can skip this and move on. Google won’t kill you for this.

FTP folders

I don’t have the chance to spy on FTP folders of others but mine sure have a lot of junk folders and files before I clean it on New Year day. My host, Lunarpages offers me 300GB of storage which I don’t have to worry about storage problems. For some who host their blogs on a much smaller hosting package should really clean up their FTP folders once every two weeks.

If your blog is hosted on a, say, dedicated server or virtual private server which normally has a high amount of storage space, I have heard that by uncluttering those unused files in your FTP folders will actually speed up the site load. Is this true?

Blog Comments

Why should I touch my blog comments? They are the property of my commentators.

Well, Wordpress seems to allow blog administrators which is me and you to edit the comments on our blogs, which means we are the owner of these comments and certainly we have the rights to edit them.

Why should I edit my blog comments?

I am not saying that you should fit words into the mouth of your commentators which is an immoral act! Comments should be edited for spelling and grammatical errors to make them readable and of course this will help raising the professional appearance on your blog. You can also try seeding in keywords that you are targeting to boost the keyword density of a page but this is indeed.

Blog pages

A Wordpress blog will have the function for its users to create pages such as, Advertise, About, Contact pages and so on. Some blog themes also have 404 error pages which will notify readers about the non-existence of some links. Some blog pages of some blogs such as the About page never had any changes since the blog was created.

Information there was out-dated and sometimes irrelevant to the blog anymore. 404 pages can be improved by integrating humorous creatives which can ease the frustration of readers who failed to find the stuffs they want or a resource list which will lead them to what they want or make money for yourself by putting in ads or affiliate links on the page.

Themes

When you started blogging, I am sure most of you tested all the nicest blog themes out there that you can find. You upload all of them into your server, test them one-by-one. You finally found what you like but your are too lazy to remove from your FTP folders just like your plugins!

Clean it up although it will just create a theme gallery in your admin panel if you don’t. The last thing I want is a misclick on one lousy theme which I will need it last on my blog and my Internet connection is gone. For a few hours, my blog will be making appearance in a beggar costume.

SEO factors

Search engine optimization work on your blog is an ongoing work. Although this is the case for most bloggers, some of us don’t have the time to fill up the All-In-One SEO Pack form under the post editor, adding ALT and TITLE tags to our links and images or not having many targeted keywords in our posts because we might be busy or simply forgot to perform these tasks.

Review your blog. Read back a search engine optimization guide like the SEO Book if you have one. Think about what can you do to improve the rankings of our blog on major search engines. Do you know that every single page on your blog can be optimized for search engines?

P/S: Don’t be amazed by the pic above.

Which Part of Your Blog Needs Cleaning?

After reading this, move back to your blog. Which part of it that you think needs some sort of cleaning? Also, what other sections of a blog that you think requires cleaning or revisiting by you?

We always visit the homepage of our blog, if everything is loading well without showing signs that our server is down or it is hacked, we will be very please to move on. However, inner problems such as unfound links or wrongly coded pages will remain unknown if you don’t perform frequent checks or what I call maintenance (cleaning) on these hidden areas.

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