I conducted a complete site audit of this writing blog over the past two days.
Why would I do such a boring thing? Well, I kind of had to for a couple reasons.
Those are all good reasons to stay up until 3 AM doing a lot of copy/pasting and going through every single damn article on your site.
Most are rubbish. Hey, I’ll say it! Go back to the first few months of this site and look at the format, the look…the rubbish of those articles.
They make me cringe.
Yeah, I’ve changed a few, but most I’ve kept just the way they are, for posterity’s sake.
What I have done on a lot more, however, are the following:
That’s one of the main things. I went through the spreadsheet I use for links. So far I’ve got about 350 to 400 articles on this site, so that’s a pretty big spreadsheet. I had gotten into the bad habit of dropping links into the “Amazon/SEO/Random” category in my spreadsheet, and I needed to break that up.
Here’s what the monstrosity looks like:
Why would I do such a boring thing? Well, I kind of had to for a couple reasons.
- My links have changed;
- My categories were unwieldy;
- My links spreadsheet was bothering me.
Those are all good reasons to stay up until 3 AM doing a lot of copy/pasting and going through every single damn article on your site.
Most are rubbish. Hey, I’ll say it! Go back to the first few months of this site and look at the format, the look…the rubbish of those articles.
They make me cringe.
Yeah, I’ve changed a few, but most I’ve kept just the way they are, for posterity’s sake.
What I have done on a lot more, however, are the following:
- Anchor text links pointing to subsequent articles;
- More “You Might Also Like” link boxes at the end of articles;
- Increased text size;
- Better categories;
That’s one of the main things. I went through the spreadsheet I use for links. So far I’ve got about 350 to 400 articles on this site, so that’s a pretty big spreadsheet. I had gotten into the bad habit of dropping links into the “Amazon/SEO/Random” category in my spreadsheet, and I needed to break that up.
Here’s what the monstrosity looks like:
Pretty big, huh? What’s more, I needed to go back to those articles from a year ago that didn’t have proper category placement – at least in regard to the new blog categories that have since been created – and give them better categories.
Overall this is a lot of internal SEO work that I chose to do on my site.
What really ticked me off, however, was what Weebly (the host for this site) did.
They changed all my links!
Now, I think the change is good, but boy is that a pain in the ass when it comes to checking your analytics. For weeks my stats were not going up, and I couldn’t figure out why until I saw the same links appearing, just slightly altered.
Here’s a picture of what the stats look like:
Overall this is a lot of internal SEO work that I chose to do on my site.
What really ticked me off, however, was what Weebly (the host for this site) did.
They changed all my links!
Now, I think the change is good, but boy is that a pain in the ass when it comes to checking your analytics. For weeks my stats were not going up, and I couldn’t figure out why until I saw the same links appearing, just slightly altered.
Here’s a picture of what the stats look like:
To give you a better idea, take a look at these 2 links:
http://www.bigskywords.com/1/post/2013/07/should-you-edit-your-published-novel.html
http://www.bigskywords.com/writing-blog/should-you-edit-your-published-novel
Now, both of those links point to my article on editing your published novel. But you can see the original link has a date stamp within the URL, that “/1/post/2013/07/”
That tells me when the post was put up, in July 2013, and on my Writing Blog, which is that “1” at the beginning (My Montana blog will look like this “/2/post/2013/07/”
Well, not anymore, as you can see with that new link. Now they have “/writing-blog/” in there, which is better for SEO, but damn it’s a pain in my ass when I’ve got all these old links out there.
So unless I change all those old links I’ll continue to see them crop up in my site analytic stats. It sucks.
But is it the end of the world? No, but it was the push I needed to do this damn site audit. I think you can learn a lot just looking at that massive spreadsheet image above, but I’m sure you still have some questions.
So what about those categories?
You can see that each category has a color, and that’s a little better than the color coding I was doing on my Word Counts Spreadsheet. In fact, I think I might just stop using that spreadsheet so much as I can put the word counts here just fine if I want to.
http://www.bigskywords.com/1/post/2013/07/should-you-edit-your-published-novel.html
http://www.bigskywords.com/writing-blog/should-you-edit-your-published-novel
Now, both of those links point to my article on editing your published novel. But you can see the original link has a date stamp within the URL, that “/1/post/2013/07/”
That tells me when the post was put up, in July 2013, and on my Writing Blog, which is that “1” at the beginning (My Montana blog will look like this “/2/post/2013/07/”
Well, not anymore, as you can see with that new link. Now they have “/writing-blog/” in there, which is better for SEO, but damn it’s a pain in my ass when I’ve got all these old links out there.
So unless I change all those old links I’ll continue to see them crop up in my site analytic stats. It sucks.
But is it the end of the world? No, but it was the push I needed to do this damn site audit. I think you can learn a lot just looking at that massive spreadsheet image above, but I’m sure you still have some questions.
So what about those categories?
You can see that each category has a color, and that’s a little better than the color coding I was doing on my Word Counts Spreadsheet. In fact, I think I might just stop using that spreadsheet so much as I can put the word counts here just fine if I want to.
You can see all that pink in this picture, which meant I was putting too many articles in the same narrow categories. That had to change, and that meant a full site audit.
Of course I didn’t have to do that, but I’m not a lazy prick, so I did. Yu can see my new categories in the spreadsheet, and how they correspond to the site:
Of course I didn’t have to do that, but I’m not a lazy prick, so I did. Yu can see my new categories in the spreadsheet, and how they correspond to the site:
My site is now running smoothly, damn it, and I sure hope it stays that way for a few more months. Mainly it’s just keeping those categories under control.
Well, hopefully you got an idea or two. Or else I guess it was just a waste of your time. Bummer!
Well, hopefully you got an idea or two. Or else I guess it was just a waste of your time. Bummer!
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