When I first started this blog, I thought it was a simple as writing a post and pressing publish. And don't get me wrong, it totally can be. But, if you're looking to progress your blog, grow your readership, and take a more professional stance on blogging, you need to undergo some blog maintenance. So here is a quick list of five things you can do to improve your blog behind the scenes.
Broken Links & Widgets
A link that no longer directs you to the desired page is broken. So, why are these important to fix? Think back to your last web session. If you came across a lot of '404 error's you're probably not going to stick around on that site for very long. The length of time spent on a site is known as 'Bounce Rate'. The lower the bounce rate the better as this means people are spending more time browsing, and less time 'bouncing' out of the site. The more broken links you have, the higher your bounce rate. As a result, your SEO can suffer as Google take into consideration bounce rate when ranking your site. You can use websites such as Dead Link Checker to locate and fix any broken links.
Traffic Sources
Utilising your traffic sources can help improve your page views dramatically. This tells you where your audience is coming from. For me, my biggest traffic source is Twitter. This is where I find the majority of my audience comes from. For others it may be Pinterest, Facebook etc. Whatever the case, use this to your advantage. Promote your posts more on that platform.
Revamping Old Posts
This is something I'm in the midst of doing. We tend to just focus on promoting our more recent posts, but what about the oldies? Go back and edit some of your older posts. Whether this be updating your photos with some new and improved ones, or changing up the posts layout or words. Revamping and promoting older posts not only brings the level of quality up to scratch with our more recent posts, but also provides us with more content to share with newer readers.
Search Descriptions and Alt Tags
It's important to add a Search Description, or sometimes called a Meta Description to each post, and page of your blog. This should be a short, concise description of the post/page. Your description will be shown underneath your page link in google search results and is used to grab readers attention, resulting in them clicking your link. Alt Tags work in a similar way. An alt tag is basically a description of your image. As google can't 'see' your images, these are important to add in order for your images to show up in search results. For example, if the image showed a man running, adding 'man running' to your alt tag means your image shows up in results when this term is searched. To add alt tags when writing a post, simply click on the image and select image properties and add your description.
Improving User Friendliness
Finally there is User Friendliness. This is the basic look and feel of your blog. Put yourself in the readers shoes, and make any changes your feel necessary. Could you improve your fonts and sizes? Are your images the best quality they could be? How easy is it to navigate to a specific page? Do you have a search bar?