Some of my oldest pages were dead weight for years, and I had stopped looking at them. Then I read a piece in this online marketing magazine about cleaning up existing content, and it annoyed me enough to try. The result surprised me more than any new page I have written.

I started by listing every page on the site and reading each one out loud. Painful. Half of them said almost nothing. They described my work in vague terms, repeated the same sentences with different words, and never answered a question. Those pages were not bad because of a technical problem. They were bad because I had written them to fill space.

Next came the merge. I had two pages on nearly the same subject, both thin, both repeating each other. I combined them into one proper page with everything I knew, then removed the weaker one and pointed it at the survivor. One good page beats two empty ones every time.

Then I put a short answer near the top of the pages people actually landed on. No long introduction, no story about my passion for the craft. Two or three sentences that answer the obvious question, then the details underneath for whoever wants them.

Broken links came next. I had links pointing to pages I had deleted years ago, and a couple pointing at sites that no longer existed. Fixing them was an afternoon of dull work. Worth it. A site full of dead ends feels abandoned, and I think visitors feel that even when they cannot name it.

Last, I linked related pages to each other. Not everywhere. Just where a reader would naturally want the next piece of information. Traffic on those old pages crept back up over the following months.