To deliver high-quality, consistent traffic and present your business in the best light, inbound marketing blogs need periodic maintenance. Spring is a great time to tune up your blog to make sure that you are getting the most out of it. A few areas to concentrate your spring clean up:
Clean Up Your URLs
Take a look at the URLs for your individual blog posts. Have you left the clunky default URLs? Take the time now to set up custom, search engine and reader-friendly names instead. Some people prefer to use a post name and date format, others use a simple post name URL. The results should look something like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/awesome-blog-post
or
http://www.yoursite.com/my-new-post/021414
You should be able to customize links from your blog dashboard.
Make Consistency a Priority
Do you post once a week like clockwork, or do you find that you periodically slack off? Regularly updated blogs get more readers and more buyers than ones that are neglected. The good news is, you don’t need to do all of the work yourself. Hire blog writers to take care of this aspect of your business so you are free to concentrate on other things.
Check for Broken Links
Do you have links in your sidebar to pages that have moved or sites that no longer exist? Use a link-checking utility or simply manually click through all links to make sure that they are in working order. This is also a good time to make sure that no image links are broken.
Update Your Site Map
Sitemaps tell search engines what pages on your site they should crawl. When you keep an up-to-date sitemap with all of your site’s pages, you can increase Google’s crawl frequency and get more pages indexed. There are a number of WordPress plugins that will produce detailed .xml and .html sitemaps.
Make Sure All Your Social Media Buttons Work
First things first: do you have social media buttons that allow your readers to easily find you on Facebook, Pinterest and other social networking sites? There are a number of widgets and plugins that allow you to attractively incorporate these elements in your business blog.
Click through all of your links to make sure that everything still works. This is especially important if you have done any rebranding in the past year; new social media names can mean new URLs.
Not enough time to update social media? Most blog writers also write social media updates that you can use to keep your feed fresh.
Like any other part of your business, you marketing efforts need maintenance. By giving periodic attention to the nuts and bolts of your business blog, you will find that you rise in the search engines and gain readers.
Lara S is a content writer and blogger. She’s written professionally since 1998 and specializes in creating reader-friendly posts for complex industries like healthcare, law and insurance. On the weekends, you’re likely to find her out on her sailboat or ensconced in bed with a book.
