Yesterday, we looked at five simple steps to take note of when conducting regular maintainance on your blog - most on the more technical side of blogging (e.g. backups, 404s, sitemaps). Today, we’ll look at five more. I’ve to admit these are on the more subjective side of “maintainance” though (i.e. less maintainance and more blog tip-ish), so it would be great to hear your thoughts on these.
- Highlight Old (and Hopefully Popular) Series of Posts
This step probably won’t apply until your blog is at least a year old (aiks, I’ll have to wait a few more months too), when your quality posts start sinking in your archives. While setting up a Most Popular or Best Posts section attempts to mitigate this problem, if you’re a prolific writer, you might still have tons of posts as relevant now as they were last year - even if you can’t find space for them in your Best Posts section. A good example of a blogger taking this step is Problogger’s Darren Rowse. Last month, he highlighted a series of posts written one year before that. - Identify Outdated Posts
On a related note to the above, you might also want to take note of posts that are no longer relevant today. This way, you’ll obtain a (practically free) stock of topics you might want to rewrite on in the near future - which will then help cement your position (e.g. search engine rankings or general authority) on the topics in question. One example of an easily outdated post is a product/service review. - Recognise Your Top Referrers
Even though I’ve not done this myself yet, I’m sure you’ve seen many examples of this. Often, this comes in the form of a post linking out to your top referrers, and is fundamentally good blogger etiquette. However, it does come with a couple of pretty unavoidable and mostly insignificant problems. One: Like any sort of outbound linking, a small number of bloggers you don’t link to will feel slighted (only in the spur of the moment in this example). Two: Your readers might just call you out (only jokingly here!). - Optimize/Change Affiliate Ads
I’m not sure about most of you, but I tend to take the place-and-forget mentality from contextual advertising into affiliate ads. I tend to dump Amazon, Clickbank, etc. ads inline into posts, and forget all about them until months later since it isn’t possible to regularly optimize them given the amount of work involved (you’ll have to manually change aff links for each post compared to a single template change for contextual ads). So, if you’re anywhere like me, you might want to look at your affiliate links during your regular maintainance sessions, and make some positive changes. For example, you might want to swap out a poorly performing product/service for a possibly better alternative (especially information products, i.e. e-books). -
Update/Optimise Navigation
As the only real maintainance-type point on the list, I’ve kept it as last as it can be difficult to do due to the lack of information and subjectivity regarding navigational problems. It isn’t exactly easy to determine whether your readers are being forced to make two, three or four more clicks to access the content they want, if they are being forced to do that at all. And if that’s happening, is it good or bad? Think page view inflation, which some webmasters still deem beneficial for some reason or another.
And assuming that it’s bad, then what? Are you going to dig into the path records of your readers to see how they moved around your blog? This tends to be crazily time consuming, and is often not worth the trouble. But there are a couple of simple steps you might want to consider periodically. One: Stop using “Continue Reading” / “Read More” tags or more specifically, suspend the practice of showing only excerpts on your front page, if your articles are now short enough to display in their entirety. You may have been writing long articles a few months ago, but not now. Two: Place prominent links to your most popular articles. This way, a reader who arrives by word-of-mouth won’t have to wade through all your posts just to find what they were told to come for.
And… that’s all I have on things to do when going about your periodic maintainance sessions. Anything else to add on the list?
译文:
当你全面清理博客时，至少有5件事要做
以前，在指导维护博客时，我们发现有五个简单步骤你需要注意一下，大多都是技术方面的操作（如：备份，404状态代码，网站地图等）。现在，我们还将关注至少5个方面。尽管知道这些更多是我们从主观方面来谈维护工作（也就更少维护，多写博客），但我很高兴能听听你对这方面的想法。
1. 突出旧的（希望是受欢迎的）帖子
如果你的博客开通没到一年的时间，这一步可能还用不上。（哥们：那我不得不等上几个月）因 为到那时好的帖子会淹没在你的众多文章之中。而你可以设置一个包含最受欢迎或最好帖子的区域，试试看能不能缓和这个问题。如果你是个多产写手，你可能有成堆地帖子今天的就像去年的一样，即使你无法在好帖子部分为他们找个地方。职业博客者Darren Rowse把这一步做得很好。上个月他突出显示了一系列一年前写的帖子。
2. 确定过时的帖子
还有一个和上面的注意事项有关的要注意，那就是你也要留意那些和现在没什么联系的帖子。这样你就可以得到一些可以不久后重写的主题（随便你），它可以巩固你的帖子在被讨论帖子中的位置（例如：搜索引擎排名，普遍威信）。例如产品和服务评论都是容易过时的。
3. 认可你的查看最多的会员
尽管我一直也没有这么做，但我确定你见过很多这样的例子。通常，这种形式的帖子会链接的你的查看最多的会员那里，这是一个好的博客的基本礼节。然而，它也会带来一些不可避免也无关紧要的问题。一：像一些外部链接，你没有链接少部分博客会感到被冷落（仅仅会是短暂的不舒服）; 二：你的读者或许会把你踢出来（开个玩笑）
4. 优化/改变附属广告
我不能肯定你的大部分内同，但是我倾向于采取放任和忽略的心态对于上下文广告到附属广告，我倾向于阻断亚马孙、点击银行等。许多广告在线链接到帖子，并忽略所有信息直到数月以后，因为无法按时定期优化完成大量的工作（与单一的模板相比你必须要手动改变个人链接为每一个换成上下文的广告）。所以，如果你想我一样到处跑，你可能会看到你的广告链接就在你博客定期维护阶段，还要作出一些积极的改变。有个例子，你可能想更换掉一个不太好的产品或者服务用一个可能更好的替代（尤其是信息产品，如电子书）。
5. 更新/优化导航
作为唯一真正维护型站点,我一直保持它就像以往一样无法再加入信息和主观性内容的导航问题。这相当难得去确定是否你的读者们在被强迫去两次、三次或更多的点击他们想要看的内容，是否他们正在被强迫做那些。如果是这样，那是好还是坏呢？可以 想一下通货膨胀，有些网络管理员仍然认为是有益的基于某些方面的原因。
假设如果结果是坏的,然后呢?你是否要打算研究你的读者们的记录轨迹，看他们如何围绕你的博客？这将会极大的浪费时间，而且这么麻烦是不值得的。但有几个简单的步骤,你可能会经常考虑考虑。一：禁用“继续阅读”/“多更多”标签或者更具体的说，暂停将你习惯性的将摘要挂在首页上，如果你的文章很短能够全部显示。你或许将会写更长的文章在数月之前，但不是现在。二：放一些显著的链接到你的最受欢迎的文章上。这样，读者会通过口碑来看，而不是费力的浏览你的所有帖子仅仅为找一篇他们想要看的。
嗯…就写这么多了，博客要进行定期的维护有以上这么多事情去做。所列的还有什么需要增加的吗？