End of Year Blog Maintenance
December 20th, 2014
I’m closing in on the 10 year blogiversary here at Muskblog. Muschamp.ca has actually been online for over a decade. I swear I spend more time editing old blog postings rather than adding new content. I’m the rare web denizen who cares about accuracy and Quality rather than just trying to game the system to increase my Klout.
The rise of micro blogging
I think the rise of Twitter and other social networks has led to a decrease in actual blogging. It is much easier to share a link and 120 characters of text rather than to write an entire post. It is easy to take a quick snap on your mobile phone and hashtag the hell out of it rather than put up a whole gallery of photos which you’ve carefully curated, cropped, and described in Flickr.
Social Media for Images
Assuming Flickr is still usable form China and iPhoto is truly working better I will make greater use of it in 2015. Hosting all your own images especially on the social media dominated web makes less and less sense. I still think having a featured image, which must be uploaded into WordPress’s database is wise. One or more images can provide a large benefit to search engine optimization, but if popularity is truly your goal you should also upload and share images on Twitter or Instagram. This will also save you money on web hosting.
Quality VS Popularity
I probably should care more about popularity, but after what happened during my MBA, I just had to get away from anyone even remotely deceitful or someone who tolerates poor spiteful behaviour in colleagues. If you care about popularity you should blog about a topic that is popular. Niche blogs can do very well but if you have dreams of a media empire you pretty much had to start at least five years ago, ten would have been better and you should have blogged about celebrities or tech. Rumours and gossip being the alpha and omega of the popularity obsessed. Whether you care about Quality or popularity, learning to use tags effectively will help with SEO and make your blog more organized.
WordPress SEO
The name that has become synonymous with WordPress SEO is Yoast which is actually spelled Joost, he and his team advocate against the overuse of tags. I was perhaps guilty of this at one point, but of course my blog is so old it predates WordPress tags. Part of the blog maintenance I’ve been doing is trying to get the number of tags used on each post to five or less. I’ve also tried to use more useful even more popular tags. And perhaps most shocking of all I’ve deleted over 100 posts. No one read them, no one was probably ever going to read them and they just were not very focussed or high Quality. Hopefully by removing them people will find the better content more easily.
KPIs
The other quality control blog maintenance tasks I’ve been engaged in for the last year or so was adding featured images, improving descriptions and titles, and choosing custom excerpts. All this behind the scenes maintenance has hopefully resulted in a higher level of utility for my readers. I don’t go crazy with KPIs for my personal blog, but I have been using Google Analytics for the entire existence of the product on this domain so I have a lot of data. I’ll have to see if 2015 becomes the most successful year ever for Muskblog.
Tag Archives
Tag archives are another thing Yoast is against, at least against letting search engines index them. I followed his advice but after all this blog maintenance I was curious as to what some of my more popular tags are:
Now it is five year later and I once again am giving this blog a massive overhaul in an attempt to improve Quality and improve my career prospects. I definitely have not been able to blog my way to a better career. If you have thoughts on blog Quality or the importance of blog maintenance you can leave a comment below.
This entry was originaly posted on , it was last edited on and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Blogging, Quality, SEO, Taxonomy, WordPress.
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