I'm in the homestretch of the 31 Day Challenge and I think that I can now officially say that blogging has taken over about 40% of my conscious brain capacity. I now eat, sleep and breathe blogging. . . But on through the next tasks.

Day 22: Go on a Dead Link Hunt
If you've been blogging for awhile, it's safe to say that you're going to have some dead links hanging around in your posts. It's been about a year for me, plus I tend to post a lot, so it's probably good that  today's task is to rid myself of the dead links clogging up my blogging mojo. According to Darren, this will ensure that my readers don't encounter the dreaded "404: Page Not Found" and it will improve my rankings in search engines.

So off I go with Dead-Links.com to spider through my site and find the links that need to be fixed. Fortunately I'd already seen Paul Webster's post on his experience with dead link hunting, so I didn't freak out when 30 minutes later I was presented with an EXTENSIVE list of "problem links."  Fortunately, like Paul, I found that most of my dead links weren't actually dead. The ones that were came from commenter sites and those weren't going to have a huge impact on people, so I decided to not worry about fixing them. A couple of others were broken for content, so I fixed those, but fortunately there weren't many. So as Eklavya would say "Task completed "

Day 23: Do a Search Engine Optimization Audit on Your Blog
If you're trying to build traffic to your blog, having a high rank in Google and other search engines is a good place to start. Just about everyone does a Google search when they're looking for online information, so if you want your site to appear on the first page or two, it's a good idea use some tricks to help your blog along, according to today's assignment in which I'm to conduct a search engine optimization (SEO) audit on my blog.

The best advice came from Darren's post on everything he knows about SEO:

My main advice to people wanting to optimize their blogs for Search Engines is to keep it simple. Start with quality content on a specific topic and then tweak it using the best current advice going around.

He then goes on to describe off-site and on-site techniques for improving your rankings. (Off-site techniques are things that are done through other sites, while on-site refers to what you can do on your own blog.)

Darren's guide to SEO is amazingly rich and honestly and I'd love to dig into it more deeply. But this is one that will have to wait a few weeks as I just don't find my brain operating in this mode right now. I start thinking about "keywords" and "title tags" and I can feel my eyes rolling back into my head. So as I seem to be saying more often than not lately,  "Task put on hold." At least for now.