Blog Cleanup Episode 1: Tags – Out!

Cleaning up this blog has been something I’ve always wanted to do… but never got down to doing it. Today, I finally killed my procrastination and got the ball rolling. And man. Its amazing how much JUNK I’ve found in my blog after these years of learning from the experts.

Tags on this Blog

Blogtags are outTags on this blog started in the pre-WordPress-tag era, back in the days when the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin was the king of plugins – creating tags that linked directly to Technorati, so people doing tag-surfing would pop by your blog and check out what you’re publishing.

(Actually I wasn’t sure whether people actually surf based on tags… but uhm… tagging seems to be HOT those days)

Then, in WordPress 2.3, Matt and his team decided that WordPress should have tags built in! There was a mass migration from UTW’s tags into WordPress tags. At that time, the All in One SEO Pack plugin was either not yet invented, or more possibly, I was still aloof of the fact that the wonderful plugin exists. I was still using my tweaked template to add different meta descriptions and keywords to my posts.

So. Back then, each of my tags led to a page on its own, and since most of my tags were terribly messed up, most tags were used only once… which meant HORRIBLE internal content duplication within my blog! Yikes! (and worst still, erm… I didn’t realise this at that time!)

Luckily, AIO SEO appeared, and with the option to “no index” tag pages, I did so immediately. In fact, I “no index”-ed everything except my main page, pages, single posts, and category pages. Afterall, these pages contained all the information there is on this blog. Any more would risk content duplication if not managed well.

But the tagging continued as part of habit – whenever I blogged, I added tags. And more tags, and MORE tags.

So much so, when I looked at my tag cloud today, what I found was a tag thunderstorm.

Messy Blog Tags

My tags were not used consistently, I had misspellings of the “WordPress”, some tags were hyphenated, some had underscores, and then some had spaces… it was just a huge mess, and I found most of my tags were used only once… which meant that even if you clicked on the tags expecting to find more posts on the same tag, you will probably be disappointed.

So with the consideration that my tags do help me in my search listings today (they were kicked out of the index after I implemented AIO SEO!), I’ve decided to remove tags from all my posts. Yep, tags no more. Never really liked them, wasn’t good with them, and now no more use for them.

I’m not saying tags have no use. When implemented well, tags can essentially replace search. If you able to predict what your visitors search for, then you can create a tag for that, and lump in the posts that are related… and that takes a TON of discipline (which I obviously do not have).

So I’ll stick to my categories. And yes there is a difference between categories and tags.

Are you using your tags correctly? Or should you be cleaning up your blog too?

New Theme for Blogopreneur.com

I’ve finally gotten down to work on the new theme for Blogopreneur.com. This is the 3rd time there is a radical change in design, and the new theme is put in place so I can add more content to this site apart from the blog posts.

So new things are coming, change is on the way. 🙂

Here’s the old theme:

blogopreneur old theme

and this is the new (current) one:

blogopreneur new theme

In the process of changing the theme, I decided to take away my free e-course (its long outdated), and also did a lot of cleaning up – my categories, tags and stuff. Well this means a lot of work is still pending in the backend, fiddling with my .htaccess files. I’m expecting it to be nothing less than a nightmare! Haha!

But change is good, change keeps up moving, so do let me know what you like about the new theme, and how I can further improve it!

Blogopreneur’s New Logo

I redid a new logo for this Blogopreneur site today, as the first step to the complete facelift of the site.

My old logo, as seen below, was designed back in 2006 when I first started this blog.

Blogopreneur Logo

When I did that logo, I didn’t know what to expect – it was in the WordPress 1.5 era and I was very new to WordPress, business blogging and all the stuff.

So its high time.

Blogopreneur 2 Logo

I know, the new logo looks very much like the original one. I didn’t give it a total revamp because I still like the style. I just wanted to make it closer to a web 2.0 style with more gradients, and add a more serious look to it with a more serious typeface and sharper edges.

Give me your comments and feedback – which looks better?

So, what has the Blogopreneur been up to?

Alrighties, its been over 20 days since I last posted or read my feeds… so I guess many of you are wondering – what has the Blogopreneur been up to?

Unleash Your Marketing GeniusFor the past three months, I’ve been spending over 12 – 14 hours away from home, since I’ve started full time work with a friend, so you can see that my number of posts have slowed down a lot, since the focus was more to help my friend push up his portal Shopping.sg. Its been both fun and tiring – my first time working on a portal, and along the way I’ve also picked up quite a lot of new tips on Joomla (well, I found out eventually that I hated it) and WordPress.

Anyway, as mentioned in my bloggy birthday post earlier this month, I am coming back! And now is the time.

In fact, right at this moment as I am typing this post, I’m in my hotel room in Kuala Lumpur, and in just 20 minutes, I’ll be leaving for KLCC to learn from Internet Marketing guru Stephen Pierce in his mega event Unleash Your Marketing Genius.

Really looking forward to the 4 days of intense learning!

Will update again soon. 😉

Happy Bloggy Birthday, Blogopreneur!

Hah. I’ve been spending like 18 hours out of home these few days, terribly busy with work, but I just gotta post this today.

Yeah, this blog is one year old! Happy Birthday Blogopreneur!

Blogopreneur Birthday

The past one year has be exhilirating – 294 posts (that’s not a lot actually, compared to some people I have in my blogroll), 1421 comments… and the most popular post being the one on the Installation of WordPress MU on a CPanel Server.

I guess the time which I enjoyed the most were the days where I stayed up late at night (in Singapore time) to keep pressing the refresh (F5) key on some of the blogs in my blogroll just to refesh the comments and keep chatting – like Liz’s, Ted’s, and of course Easton’s (who was the one who introduced me into this world of business blogging). It was fun!

Along the way, this blog has also help me to get in touch with many local entrepreneurs and business bloggers – John Tan, Walter, Glenn, Alvin and Calvin. You people are great – thanks for all the comments and support.

Yeah, as mentioned, work has been piling up on me, so its been kinda tough taking time to blog, but you know what? Shhh… I’ll be back blogging fanatically soon! Tell you guys more when that happens 🙂

I gotta get back to work now. :mrgreen: