Since you already (hopefully) have your legal blog up and running and are reaping the rewards from a job well-done, don’t forget the importance of constantly maintaining your legal blogs. You can choose to update your blog or blogs the old-fashioned way—by hand, one at a time, or you can use a tool like Ping.fm, which allows you to update them all at once, although you must compose a blog post to do so. You could also use RSS, which stands for Real Simple Syndication and essentially allows you to find or create an RSS feed which updates your blog in a more mechanical way, through an RSS URL feed, which feeds data you have chosen as content you would like to see on your blog as updates to your blogs. This method does definitely lack the personal touch, but can be somewhat effective. Beyond these two methods, there are plenty of maintenance that should be done on a regular basis to ensure your blog sites remain worry-free and exceptionally effective.
WordPress Applications Which Need Regular Checkups
WordPress can be an absolutely fantastic for your legal blogging, as it is generally full of features, fast, and works flawlessly—at least the majority of the time. Sometimes, however, we human beings play around with the program, installing themes or plug-ins, which can eventually make WordPress go crazy. To ensure your blog problems don’t have a runaway, make sure you do regular check-ups and maintenance such as:
- Check your feeds—they can be broken without you even knowing it, so test them well.
- Contact pages can be broken as well without your knowledge—check them often.
- When you set up your blog WordPress automatically fills in the About section. Specific themes may display your About section on the main page by default, so make sure the information provided is always updated and filled out to avoid seeming unprofessional.
- Make sure you check the bottoms of every page as they can appear to be working properly while hiding an error at the end.
- Adsense Ads can confuse GoogleBot, causing it to show irrelevant ads on your blog which can be extremely detrimental; look into some of the plug-ins out there for targeting Adsense.
- Be sure to check your link bar for broken links; you don’t want dead links sitting in your sidebar wasting space—and people’s precious time.
WordPress Plug-ins Which Can Help Your Legal Blog
Once your law firm’s blog has been up and running, for months, or even years, it is a sure bet that some of your links will be broken. Use Broken Link Checker as a plug in on WordPress to automatically find broken links, saving you time. Word Press Antivirus checks your theme for any lurking malicious code; you can easily enable a daily scan to ensure nobody is able to insert malicious code. Akismet is a spam-fighting tool for WordPress which can totally eradicate spam on your blog, and Redirect can help you redirect (hence the name) all URLs to the settings of your choice, thus preventing Google from thinking your site has duplicate content. Finally, the WP Security Scan can check to make sure your WordPress installation is secure by looking at several different factors including password strength and database security.
A Few More Tips for Legal Blog Maintenance
Blog maintenance also includes refreshing your header banner and site images on a regular basis, at least monthly, in order to keep the site looking new for your visitors. We humans tend to pay more attention to any site if we have the perception it is different, even slightly. Check your sidebar links for dead links, making sure it remains fresh and relevant, and that the sites you link to are current and are consistently providing content of quality which you support. Your content pages are essential to the success of your website so should be consistently updated with quality content, making them valuable to your readers and potential clients. Make sure your About page is consistently updated with content and photos. Perhaps someone in your firm has recently won a high profile case, or your firm is adding a specialty, these things definitely need updating. Consider enhancing and expanding your top five blog posts of the month; look over them and look for any outdated information, or take direction from the questions or comments your received on a particular blog. All of these tips, if done on a regular basis can ensure that your legal blog remains high in the search engine rankings, bringing traffic, thus revenue to your law firm.
Tags: Law Firm Blog Maintenance Tools, law firm content management software
