A fall cleaning for your blog

Ahhhhh, fall! The squirrels and birds are having a wonderful time taking tiny little bites out of the apples on my apple tree. The spoiling fruit falls to the ground and the dog thinks they’re perfect playthings for the house. I bribe the dog with a cookie to move away from the nasty apple so I can toss it in the trash….

The days are getting cooler and I’ve started cold weather preparations like getting the furnace checked. That’s the same reason I’ve also started fall cleaning my website. WordPress just keeps chugging along, I do the updates, and everything is rosy. But is the site effective and findable to the search engines? Or will it sputter out like my furnace did last winter? I ran the website grader at Hubspot to see how the site is doing. This free service has some very cool stuff you can learn about your site.

Like:

  • Your website’s rank in the search engines
  • An analysis of your blog – whether your posts are retweeted in Twitter, whether your pages are indexed by Google and most interesting, the readability level of your blog.
  • The optimization of your site – metadata and headings, and do your images have ALT text.
  • How many inbound links your site has – the better for the search engines to find you
  • There was way more, and all came with suggestions on how to improve my site’s ranking.

How did I score? Some good, some not so good. Best of all, I could sign up to get emailed reports on how my site is progressing.This will be an ongoing project.

Next up later this week: More fall cleaning for your WordPress website and blog. Does it rock for your visitors or has it become old and stodgy?