Spring is in the air and everywhere I look I come across spring cleaning blogging tips. I wonder, why wait for spring? I guess since that is when we do our spring cleaning.

All puns aside, you should regularly check your blog - call it spring cleaning if you like. I would prefer to clean it more often. The question is, what do you clean?

I have spoken in the past about blog plugins so I wont go down that track again. However one post I read recently suggested you go through your blog and delete any old post that are no longer relevant or no longer receive any traffic.

Sometimes it can be a good idea, however I think this can be fraught with danger. I can readiliy identify the following problems if you decide to delete old posts:

• Links 1: how many other posts have linked to that post. You will need to go back through those posts and edit all the links.
• Links 2: how many post has this post linked to and passed link juice
• Link Juice 1: what is the page you are about to delete worth when it comes to link juice
• Link Juice 2: have you capitalized on the pages link ability

The last point is important. Rather than deleting the post, can you use it to link into other posts that you want to promote? Can you revive the post by grabbing an excerpt and commenting or updating the information.

Perhaps I am being precious. However I don’t like the idea of throwing out something that is a part of me - particularly if I can still get some mileage out of it.

Spring cleaning is fine and a good idea - throwing out posts - I don’t think so - at least, not until I determine if there is more mileage to be had. Not all blogging tips are gems, at least, not until you have thought through them.

Most blogs have a couple of static pages, pages that don’t change, yet serve to fulfill a need. When considering your blog content, these pages should be used to advantage. Two pages in particular are often either ignored, or padded with some basic info and little else.

Blog content on these pages, if optimized properly, can even rate highly in search engines so think carefully before hitting them with a ‘no follow’ or ‘no index’. Two pages that can be optimized are the ‘About Us’ page and the ‘Contact Us’ page.

About us pages often display a brief history and that is it. Your about us page should provide basic information, however they are also a perfect place to sell your brand and your product range. If you have a product range that is constantly changing, then don’t include specifics. You can still produce keyword rich blog content related to your organization and your brand.

Contact us pages are so under utilized. You will often see a contact us page that just has an email address - nothing else. This is a total waste of a page. You can produce very effective blog content on this page that includes branding and product information.  Even if you are a personal blogger, set up several email accounts (and then redirect them to all to one).

On your contact page you can then produce blog content related to various aspects of your blogging with a different email address attached to each aspect. Make sure each area is rich in appropriate keywords and let the spiders index it.

With careful use of keywords and links back to the appropriate areas on your blog, you can get plenty of mileage from what where once very unflattering static pages. Your visitors that read these pages will find them more professional.  Blog content does not just relate to how, when and what you post. It relates to the blog as whole including effective use of all pages.

Social bookmarking is a popular way to get your blog posts out into the broader online community and StumbleUpon is one the most popular bookmarking sites available. However, if you occasionally thumb your own posts, be careful you don’t end up in the Stumble graveyard.

StumbleUpon can really provide your blog with a boost in traffic. When it comes to social bookmarking, get a couple of thumbs up and if your lucky, you will get a steady stream of traffic. However, to get that traffic the thumbs up  or ’stumble’ has to be done the right way.

I have seen many good posts killed because they were not stumbled correctly. The person who ‘discovers’ your post by thumbing it has to also provide a review. If they fail to write a review, the stumble ends up in the graveyard.  There are many theories as to why this happens but the general consensus is that for the first stumble, a review is required. If no review is offered then the stumble sits in limbo continuing to wait for that first review. Social bookmarking is fine, if everyone follows the rules.

If you get one of your social bookmarking friends to ’stumble’ one of your posts, make sure they also write a review. If you stumble it yourself, don’t be afraid to write that review. Some bloggers seem to shy away from writing reviews for their own posts, however this is the easiest way to kill the post.

Social bookmarking is a great way to meet people and promote yourself. It can also cause problems. I am waiting for the day that individuals start to abuse this stumble gliche to effectively kill posts from their competition.  Perhaps the powers that be at StumbleUpon can find a way around the problem.

If you are running a business, whether it is online or the more traditional bricks and mortar business, running a web site and a blog may be too time consuming. Blog content services are growing and it can sometimes be difficult to find the best one suited to your business.

Blog content providers do just that, they provide articles or content that can be published on your site. Some providers offer extra services such as managing your blog, submitting your blog to directories and submitting your articles to social networking sites.

There are cheaper ways of obtaining blog content including including using PLR articles (private label rights), these however are sold to hundreds of others so the content is not unique. The amount of time you spend reworking them into unique content is not too different to just sitting down and writing the content yourself. PLR generally is to generic to be used to sell products.

When looking for a blog content provider, look at what services they are actually offering; how frequently they will provide the content; what costs are involved (in total) and what experience they have in a providing blog content in general and more specifically to your niche.

Another option that is available is to share the blog content creation. This can be done using your own skills to create content together with professional content providers. This can be done to suit your needs such as every other day, or just set days each week.

One of the major benefits to employing a professional blog content provider is that the content itself is always going to be relevant to your keywords (and rich in those keywords), fresh, and carefully edited when it comes to spelling and grammar. If you can justify the cost, consider a blog content provider to turn your blog into a professional face for your business.

Scrappers are everywhere at present and often you will not even be aware of there presence. For those who are uninitiated, a scrapper is someone who copies your content and publishes as their own. These tips may at least help to thwart them.

My first tip, whilst it wont stop them,  it certainly provides you with links back to your pages and advertises to the world that the content has been scrapped.  The tip, include a least one link within the post to one of your pages. You can also use a second little trick which involves publishing your post, noting its url, then editing the post and including the url somewhere near the end.

Having you post covered with your links may not stop them, it will however provide you with some links. The second step is to actually determine if you are being scrapped. This can be fairly easy. Copy a paragraph of text and paste it into Google’s search engine. If your content is out there Google should find it.

If you have been scrapped, contact the owner and ask them to delete the post. If they don’t, contact the host. At the same time advise Google of content theft. If they are displaying Google ad units they will most likely be suspended.

Scrapping is hard to combat particularly some of the new smart scrappers. They are subscribing and using your RSS feed as a post.  This is often only the first paragraph and they are smart. They will link back to your site to  ‘read the rest of this article’ but use a written by fictitious name.

If you have been scrapped, and who hasn’t these days, get your feed published through Feedburner. This often gets your new page indexed quickly, faster than a scrapper can get it published. Together with your links in the content the search engines will generally assume yours is the original the scrappers dulplicate content.

You can try to sue but these guys are fly-by-night so it is rather pointless.  The are many WordPress tip on how to stop these guys. The bottom line often is to just let them go, milk them for links, and notify Sheriff Google each time.

Big businesses are jumping on the blog bandwagon, what about small businesses, is it worth the effort or time to create a blog? Blogs are strange creatures. They are easy to start, easy to maintain and easy to create content. Perhaps too easy.

There are millions of great blogs throughout web. There are tens of millions of absolute garbage blogs as well. The problem is that creating a blog is easy. Grab a cheap dot com. Get some cheap or free hosting. Install WordPress and start publishing your life story. Or perhaps start creating the very best in solid content. Or perhaps take the lazy way out and scrape some RSS content. It can be very easily done.

If you are small business and wondering whether or not to start a blog, take a number of issues into account before you start.

The first of these is commitment. Once you start a blog and have your business associated with it, you need to maintain it. If you blog starts to look stale and dreary, it may adversly affect your business.

Do you have the ability to create content that will interest your readers.  Content is one of the most important aspects to a creditable blog.

Dollars. Blogging can be a cheap form of advertising however you need to have the time and commitment to make a successful blog. Either that or spend money to have professionals do it for you.

Small businesses often don’t have the resources to pay for professional blogging services. However, often the money spent could result in a small business gaining a strong growth spurt that elevates them from the small to medium size business.

Blog and website services are growing at a steady pace with competition bringing down prices. Small businesses into the future will need to ask whether or not they can afford not to blog. Blogging can be effective in increasing your business online.

From the beginning of March this year Feedburner introduced a new system that allowed feed owners to transfer their feed to another user.

This is of particular interest to those who are buying or selling blogs that have a Feedburner account. The ability to transfer feeds is not new, in the past it was done manually. The process is now fully automated and very straightforward with instant results - unlike the past where delays could drift into days.

To transfer a feed, the Feedburner account holder enters the information related the feed being transferrred along with the recipients email address. The recipient responds to the email and either logs into their current account or creates a new account.

That’s it. Job done. Nothing could be easier.  The transfer feed link can be found on the dashboard just below your sites name.  It attached to the  Edit Feed - Delete Feed - Transfer Feed line of links.

Now there is no excuse not to use Feedburner to send out your RSS feeds each time you create a new post.

Blog metrics is an inexact science at the best of times. You can however give your Blog SEO strategies a real boost if you know how to read the Google Goldmine (aka Google Analytics) - the deeper you dig - the more gold you may find buried.

Google Analytics provides a wealth of information and sometimes it can be fairly daunting to try and wade through it all. However if you can try to learn how to use it, one section at a time, you will the information is not only useful, but information you can act on.

If you look at the visitors section as an example. Google Analytics provides a nice graphical representation of how your visitors arrived on your site. Where they referred, did they come from a search engine or did they come directly? Dig a little deeper and you can get a breakdown of those statistics.

For example, you can see which sites have referred traffic to your site and in what numbers. You can also see which search engines are referring traffic to you. Dig a little deeper again and you will see what search terms the visitors are using to find your site. Now you are starting to get to the meat.

By identifying which search terms are being used, you can gain a greater understanding of where you need to concentrate your keywords optimization. If you are using a list of a dozen or so keywords yet only getting hits from half that list, perhaps it time to review your keyword strategies. Are the keywords still relevant? Do you need to concentrate on some keywords a little more?

Most blog metrics packages allow you to look at these statistics. With a little thought you can turn this raw data into valuable information that will enable you to fine tune your blog SEO strategies. Tweak a keyword here, remove another keyword and replace it with a longtail that is more appropriate; suddenly your targeted traffic starts to increase.

As your traffic grows from search engine referrals you will be able to refine your strategies even further. Blog metrics are often ignored or only looked at with a passing interest. If you spend a little a time, you find they are little gold mines, the further you dig, the more valuable the information can become.

How often do you need to submit your blog to the search engines as part of your blogs SEO strategies? Good question but a very short answer. In reality - once - when you first establish the blog.

Search engines are pretty good at finding information for themselves - they don’t need constant reminders. If you do want to remind them, just submitting your sitemap as a part of a blog SEO strategy is enough to have them come back and visit.

You are better off ensuring that when the spiders do come a trolling, everything is ready for them. Some components are very important and using a spider simulator as part of your blog SEO routine can be a good idea. Spider simulators let you see what the spider sees. This is particularly helpful for identifying broken or super slow pages. These pages may prevent your page from being spidered successfully.

Other on page areas to look at include:

• Meta tags: page title, description and keywords
• Page headings and content
• Keyword use which matches your meta tags for keywords
• Internal links
• External links (that you have some control over)
• Alt and title tags for videos and images

Submitting your site a million times will not improve your rankings and as a part of blog SEO activities is a waste of your valuable time. Spend time optimizing the above points and leave the spidering to the search engines.

Being able to keep your blog fresh is often a very difficult task. It is to easy to fall into an everyday blogging habit that becomes dreary and tiresome - it then starts to show in your content. These blogging tips may just help to keep you on track, keep you alive, and keep your blog looking alive and fresh.

1. Provide variety in your content - whilst you may need to stay within your niche, that doesn’t mean you cannot provide a bit of variety through the use of graphics, video and perhaps even some humor.
2. Spend as much time writing an eye catching title as you do your content.  Titles hook the reader.
3. Work on that first paragraph. After the title, the first paragraph is what will keep your visitor reading the balance of your post.
4. Using contrasting layouts. Don’t just stick to writing paragraphs. Include bullet points, numbered points and formatting features such as bold and perhaps color. Learn to create style sheets for your posts.
5. Mix up the length of your posts. Quick short posts are less draining than long in depth posts. Use the short posts to give yourself a break and to break up the page.
6. Make the page easily scanable highlighting relevant points. Most visitors these days are looking for a quick summary read - they can then file the post away for future reference or move on.
7. Proofread your content. Don’t always try to proof read your work immediately. Come back an hour later and proof read it. You will be surprised how many more errors you will find with that one hour break.
8. Knowledgeable - if you are not totally sure of the subject matter, do a little research. If you are still unsure then either don’t write about it, or turn it on its head and admit your limited knowledge; ask your readers for input. You will often find that people just cannot help but stick their noses in and add their little bit.
9. If it is appropriate, provide relevant links to further information on within your own site or on another site. If you feel readers may jump ship to another site then either create the links to open in a new window, or place all the links as further reading links at the end of the article.
10. Use comments from previous posts as starting points for a new post. The commentator will love you for the exposure and your readers will be encouraged to comment more often.
11. Learn to write commentaries about other blogs and their articles. This is particularly useful if you have something to add to the article or have a valid counter opinion. Readers like to see debates, or alternate views.
12. Get to know to your regular readers and acknowledge them occasionally. One sure way to increase your reader base. As new readers arrive they see that regulars are being mentioned, their comments referred to and of course your posts referring (with links) to their posts. Serious bloggers will want to get in on that action.

One more blogging tip. One of the best ways to freshen yourself up is to read other blogs. Putting together a list of blogs that inspire you is not overly difficult. I bookmark half a dozen blogs that I like and place them into the one bookmark folder. When I am a little bored or lacking inspiration I just go to that folder and open them all at once (using Firefox). I can then move between them, reading, comparing and always gaining more inspiration.

These 12 blogging tips should help to keep you fresh and if you are fresh, your blog will be fresh.

Blog plugins are one of those ‘cannot live with - cannot live without’ things that occasionally irritate us.  Don’t get me wrong, plugins do a great job at adding that extra dimension to your blog. They are also a great aid to reducing your workload - well sometimes anyway.

The problem is, unless you check them every day they have this habit of getting out of control. You check your blog plugin option from the dashboard and it seems like every second one needs an update. So you go through all the updates. A week later, here we go again.

I have found one solution. Go through each of the blog plugins that you have activated and really think about whether or not you need it. I would also do a search on the specific plugin to see if there are any others out there that can do the same job. Better yet, there are some blog plugins available that can do multiple jobs, particularly in the SEO area.

Once you have sorted out what can stay and what can go, delete the unnecessary ones and learn to live without them. As a side benefit you will find that your blog loads a just a little faster.

As bloggers I think at times we become to ‘plugin happy’. A new blog plugin becomes available and the first thing we do is download it and give it a try. Often it is a plugin that we have done without in the past - and if that is the case, we can do without it in the future.

Before installing a blog plugin, or keeping what you have now. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Does it improve my readers viewing experience
2. Does it improve my readers ability to communicate
3. Does it have any SEO value
4. Does it have an blog protection value (spam)
5. Does it help me create a better post

If you answer no to all those questions, then deactivate the blog plugin. If you answer yes to any of those questions then ask one more - is it being duplicated with another plugin?

Blog plugins can be a great aid - they can also be a pain in the ……..

Google prefer the term ‘next’ and ‘previous’ button, too me it looks like a scroll button. Whatever you wish to call it, will it make any difference to your Adsense income?

You can see the ‘next’ ‘previous’ buttons in the bottom left of this graphic from the Adsense Blog.

The theory behind the ‘next’ ‘previous’ buttons is that if the viewer cannot see an ad that suits them they will use the ’scroll’ buttons to look at some of the other ads to find what they are looking for. Fine concept in theory, however it can be difficult enough earning any blogging income from the exist ads.

If visitors are not clicking on the ads now, I cannot see them using these buttons to look at other ads. The buttons themselves are small and there is has not been any real publicity to go with the release. Are visitors even going to realize the options is there? Eventually they will. If you rely on Adsene for your blogging income, don’t expect a dramatic increase.

The ‘next’ ‘previous’ buttons have been appearing for several months now while in test mode. It seems the concept is in open mode now and all Adsense units will display the buttons. It does provide your reader with more options and perhaps over time they will become popular. Another tool in the Google war chest to help you build your blogging income - we hope so anyway.

WordPress 2.5 has finally been released. As a blog software vehicle the improvements are quite marked and will take a little getting used to. If you need to do the upgrade yourself, don’t stress, it is a breeze taking around five to ten minutes depending on your internet connection speed. My first recommendation is to get a good file transfer program (FTP) - you will need it.

The steps are detailed at WordPress.org and are fairly straightforward.  A quick outline of what you are in for:

1. Download the upgrade and extract it to a folder on your desktop
2. Deactivate all plugins in your WordPress blog
3. Delete the wp-admin and wp-includes folder
4. Upload the replacement wp-admin and wp-includes folders
5. Upload and overwrite the contents of the WP root directory (files only) to the WP root directory on your site.
6. Upload the Default WordPress theme to the Themes folder
7. Load your  site and run the database upgrade that you are presented with
8. Reactivate your plugins - I suggest one by one checking that your blog runs smoothly after each activation
9. Done

It is that easy and so far I have not come across any drama’s. If any of your plugins are out of date you can upgrade them straight from the plugins panel. That makes for a quick, easy and smooth updating of the plugins.

The Dashboard will look a little strange but I am sure you will get used to it. All in all the upgrade process is quick and easy. As for the upgrade itself - I will get back to you on that.