Spring Clean Wordpress

Kim Woodbridge has 8 great tips for spring-cleaning your Wordpress website including backing up before you start, removing redundant plugins, deleting revisions from your database and making sure you are running the latest version of the blogging software. All good stuff and definitely worth adding to your todo list but only after you’ve taken a stroll in the beautiful spring air at the vernal equinox.

Tip #7 is particularly interesting:

Examine Old Posts – go through your older posts and see if you can add links to newer ones. I have to admit that I am not good about this. I usually remember to link to my older posts but rarely go back the other way. This adds value to your visitors and has got to be useful from a SEO perspective.

It’s an interesting idea. However, if you are running a “related posts” plugin, I think that cross-linking between posts is partly taken care of. However, I would extend the idea of giving old posts a spring clean. It’s certainly worth going back to old posts that had popular content, take a look at your logs from six months to a year ago, to get an idea of which posts might be worth revising.

You can then fix outdated information, add hard links to new posts that are pertinent to the discussion, and perhaps even tidy up those typos you missed first time around. At this stage, you may also consider running Zemanta to add free blog content, fresh images, and links to related sites and content.

I’d do this job in batches, perhaps pick five or ten rather old posts, but previously popular posts, give them a spring clean. Then create a new post and link to these five or ten with a short intro explaining how refreshed the posts are. You could repeat this task weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or whatever, building up a kind of link directory to your older content and providing readers with a reason to (re)visit.