God bless I am busy! I have like zero time right now; however, I really want to squeeze out this post for my readers, so please bare with me, this isn’t going to be well written or pretty. Very quick, dry and cut to the chase.

I am doing maintenance to my blogs across the board. While doing this it dawned on me that I have acquired quite a few new readers since last time I talked about the things I am about to talk about.

Look at this post as a little blast from the past and back to basics blogging for the new folks who just jumped on board within the last few months.

You need to update your blog to WordPress 2.5 - It totally rocks. Packed full of some amazing things. No time to talk about, but trust me… just upgrade and you’ll see.
You need to get a SiteMap in place - months ago I was wrong to say that one wasn’t needed. It can do nothing but help. The main reason why I said don’t worry about it is because I have a ton of blogs to maintain and it was just an extra step and I didn’t feel it was worth the time invested. It is… get a sitemap. I recommend using this one. CLICK HERE
Use less categories and more tags- Your blog if it is focused, should really only have a handful of categories. Everything else can be sorted using tags. Consider how CD’s are sorted at a music store. Rock, Country, Jazz, etc… then consider the artists within each group. Take Rock… you have Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Doors. Your blog categories should be Rock, Country, Jazz, etc… your tags should be like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Doors. Tag pages are very useful to people and help you find things quickly. Consequently, because of that reason, they do very well in the search engines. At times my newly added tag pages will get indexed quicker than the post newly added post page itself.

Sorry for being so short and dry with my content today. I am extremely busy, but I thought that I would take a few minutes to pass along these tips to you. If you have questions, I always invite you to drop a comment in the comment form below.

P.S. Read my archives. I got over 600 articles on this blog. I am making all kinds of new friends recently but I am getting bombed with IM questions that I have covered many months ago. I love to help people, but most of the questions I get asked can be easily found in my archives.

I don’t mind answering questions, I love helping… but I figured that maybe a lot of people didn’t realize how much content I have already written in the past. Some stuff is old… other stuff I have changed my opinions on, but if all else fails, just drop a comment and I’ll try my best to answer you comments on all posts both old and new.

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Related Keyword Tags: Blog Tips, Sitemap XML, WordPress 2.5 Upgrade, WordPress Sitemaps Tips