I’m declaring the 13th of each month as the unofficial blog backup day. Meaning that you should login to your blog software and download a backup of all posts. Also, if you have access to the template files, back those up too.

Avoiding issues are much easier than trying to fix them once they happen. I’ve never seen a blog just delete itself, but I have heard of people’s hosting accounts suddenly having a hardware failure and are non-recoverable. If you don’t have a backup of your files, who does?

Yes, a good host will make backups, but that’s placing your trust fully in a third party. What if their backups are in the same office as your website and they have a fire? All is lost. If you do have a good host, then a secondary set of backups never hurt and you’ll have them at your fingertips at all times.

Ok, so this is a perfect gloom post for Friday the 13th, but you must realize that technology isn’t perfect. Your blog could go down and if you have no backup, then you’ll have to start from zero. All your hard work down the drain.

Many search engines have stated time and time again that they crawl pages they can get to easily. Basically, if it takes more than three steps to get to a page, it won’t get indexed as easily or or re-indexed as often. By adding related posts to your blog, you are now allowing a search engine spider to easily get older posts easily.

Related posts are just links to posts that were made in the past. Some may have been posted in the last week, others maybe last year. These posts have a much better change of getting updated in search engines then if they were buried in the archives.

Creating links to related posts can be done in a number of ways. One is just linking back to old posts within new posts as reference points. Another is taking the time to write out three our four related posts at the bottom of all new posts. This may be a bit more time consuming, however they will be most relevant.

It’s been said that meta keywords and description tags are dead. Where as I’d agree with the keywords tag, the descriptions tag I’m no longer convinced is dead. Actually, it’s quite important; especially for blogs.

If you use the site: command in Google, and look at Google’s descriptions (aka snippits) for a blog, you may notice some indexing issues. Usually one of two things happens. Either your blog description is generic and includes things like the date and categories, or your blog’s description is exactly the same. The second one will probably land a lot of your pages in the supplemental index.

If you check out Matt Cutt’s blog, you’ll notice that the descriptions start with the date followed by time, categories and then the first few words of his post.

Check out SEOMoz’s blog and you’ll see that most blog posts are showing up as supplementary results as all the descriptions are exactly the same “BLOG CATEGORIES. Advertising, Promotions & Public Relations Online · Analytics, Tracking & Measurement · Ask.com · Blogging & Social Tagging · Google …”

One of the downsides to a blog is the ability to easily assign meta keywords and descriptions to each blog post. I have done some research and found with a simple and fantastic plugin called HeadSpace 2.

HeadSpace 2 has two different ways of creating meta descriptions and keywords.

1) For those of us who feel we don’t have enough time, there is the automatic way. HeadSpace 2 can put an excerpt of your post in the description tag and the categories associated with the post in the keywords tag.

2) For those of us who need control, there is the manual way. Once installed each post now comes with a meta description and meta keyword box on the posting screen. Simply fill those two out and HeadSpace 2 will do the rest.

Either way is probably better than having none at all and much better than having the description or keyword tag the same on all pages.

Get HeadSpace 2

[tags]headspace, meta, description, keywords[/tags]