So, I’m in blog maintenance hell.

Over the summer I upgraded to a new version of wordpress. Somehow in the middle of it, I deleted all of my categories. Normally that wouldn’t have been a huge deal, but the way I have my permalink structure set up, the actual URL address for each post has the category in it. It basically renamed all my categories to 15 digit numbers… it was a mess. I started to make the correction to all my posts but then forgot. So I basically had several hundred blog posts with funked out categories and strange URLs.

A few weeks ago I came across a website called Website Grader. Basically it analyzes your website and tells you what sucks about it. Mine sucked pretty bad. I got a 65 out of 100. There were a few things that were pretty good, but one thing it pointed out was that it was not effectively optimized for search engines. Although a lot of my pages are indexed with Google and I get a fair amount of traffic from random web searches, my blog was not optimized like it should. What was missing? Metadata.

In every post there is some key data that Google and other search engines look for information. The Page Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords. Whenever I create a new post, I obviously write a title and I usually type in a few keywords. However, what I didn’t know was that WordPress was not transferring any of that information to my metadata. I found a WordPress  plugin called “All In One SEO Pack” that gives you a place to type in all of this metadata for each post as well as the main pages.

So, as I’m fixing all the broken categories on 300+ posts, I’m also entering all the SEO metadata. It takes about 2 minutes or so per post and I’ve got over 300 posts to fix. Yeah, I’m in blog maintenance hell, aren’t I?

Oh, and after I started using the SEO plugin and and making a few other changes, my WebsiteGrader rank shot up to an 88 out of 100. Not bad!

Before

After