One of the purposes of home carpets is to capture air borne dust particles that sneak into your home from windows or a really bad AC filter or even from dust stuck to your feet or dander. However once they capture these pollutants they cannot get rid of them.

Eventually this capture causes more harm than good as they become a reservoir of pollutants emitting dust into the air as you walk around the home.

Indoor air quality suffers if dust accumulates in the carpet causing bad odors and respiratory related health issues. A cleaning routine should focus the type of the vacuum, the frequency and the most importantly the technique

The vacuum :

If your home has a high pile carpet with a texture , then you need a medium to high power vacuum which has a rotating brush.

Regularly maintaining filters - just follow the manufacturer's instructions setting reminders. This gets overlooked by most people, but its critical to the effectiveness of the process.

Cleaning the vacuum bag frequently - its a good habit to empty the bag before throwing the trash out. With an empty bag you always know how dusty the carpet is, and probably adjust the frequency based on the dust collected.

Remove hair stuck on the roller brushes - this is critical to the life of the brush and the motor itself. If too much hair is stuck to the brush, you have an inefficient suction and sometimes dust is thrown back out.

If there is a height setting on your vacuum for the brush, you might need to lower it for low pile carpets to get the maximum suction. ( brushes might cause berber style carpets some damage if used on lower settings)

The technique :

A high pile carpet can be very tricky to clean completely if we dont follow the proper technique.

Route :
High pile carpets accumulate more dust and note that when you go back and forth you are collecting the dust with max power just on one side of the carpet's fiber.

The efficient way is to do straight lines top to bottom then bottom to top and also left to right and right to left. For heavily dusted carpets, you could do another iteration along the diagonals.

You will be shocked to see how much dust was hidden under those unexplored angles.

Order : Inner most to door
Clean the inner most room's inner most area first and work your way till the door. Usually the home/room's entrances are the dirtiest.

Speed :
Even though the manufacturer ensures your vacuum does the job in a single pass its probably a good idea to vacuum slowly. The slower you move the more time the vacuum has to work on each area.

Finally ensure that your ac filters are replaced regularly so your home gets the cleanest possible air.