Basic Blog Improvements

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I read a post at Neat Living recently about de-cluttering blogs, and it got me thinking. That post suggests several items you can go read yourself. These are some of my thoughts.

• Longer, less frequent posts? Unless you can really pack something attention-grabbing into a short post, you’re better off with longer posts that give a lot of information or opinion. While some people’s attention spans won’t make it to the end, the length of the post convinces them it was authoritative.
• Reducing categories? I’m not sure why SEO experts recommend trying to keep the categories down to 10. That just doesn’t make sense for some sites. That said, you certainly don’t need categories that sound almost but not quite exactly like the same thing. They should be consolidated, and if you have a permalinks structure that doesn’t include category, it won’t even disrupt your inbound links slightly.
• Rewriting Old Posts? This is something I do. While it doesn’t actually change the content of your site for the SEs, it seems to go over well with readers (and no, they don’t recognize posts unless they’re posts that got really widely distributed, so skip those). You can repost without rewriting, or you can update as little or much of the post as you feel should be changed to make it good, current content.
• Deleting old posts? I’m not sure what I think about this. I’d avoid deleting anything that’s got inbound links and gets clicks, but if you have some old posts that aren’t great and don’t seem to be landing pages, maybe deleting them is a good idea. Unless they’re worth re-writing, of course.
• Adding images to posts? I still don’t get this. I just don’t. I very often feel like pictures get in the way, and add little or nothing 99% of the time. But people seem to like them. I dunno. Something to consider (and yes, I’m adding them now).

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