Can you imagine being the poor sucker that has to tell his or her boss that they just blew up the company blog? I don’t care where you work, that would not be pleasant. Imagine how much worse it would be if the company blog was THE COMPANY. Today there are a number of small businesses who do nothing but blog. My wife is obsessed with one of these companies: www.seriouslysoblessed.blogspot.com.

This is a unique business to say the least.  The entire company is based off mocking young mormon mother’s blog posts. She writes every satirical blog post anonymously. This mystery lady would be ticked if her blog was accidentally erased. Or, if the free service she uses to post - blogspot - was suddenly canceled.

Segue to the purpose of this blog post…

It is probably time your company gave some thought to the possibility of a blog erasure or service melt down. Apparently, a few entrepreneurs in Utah have given these possibilities serious thought and therefore are releasing a new service to backup blogs for free. This company aims to provide a number of services and products for blog crazies everywhere including: blog to book software, free back up blog service, blogging tips and strategies, etc.

Bloggled is still in its beta version but has announced that its virtual doors will be open by November.

I read a blog post today, written by a friend of mine, about fixed assets. It has been a long time since I took that Accounting 101 class - so I have to admit I had forgotten what a fixed asset was.  For those of you who did not have the pleasure of Accounting 101 this post may not make a lot of sense.  Assuming you do know a little about accounting, and assuming that like many small business owners you personally “keep the books” this post will hopefully provide a useful tip.

To accurately track your true profit you have to have an accurate idea of all of your costs.  One of the costs that is most difficult to ascertain is the “depreciation” (the cost of using an asset) value of your fixed assets.  Why is it hard to ascertain? Because it is constantly changing.  For those of you who are spending hours trying to ascertain depreciation values, you may be happy to learn about depreciation software sometimes called fixed assets software.

Apparently, there is a fellow Arizona company by the name of CMI Fixed Assets based out of Safford, which has developed some pretty outstanding software designed to simplify tracking your fixed assets.  By all accounts the software is affordable, tested, and comprehensive.  Anyway, I love to promote other Arizona companies when given the chance, particularly, in this terrible market.  Take a look at CMI!

I recently went to lunch with the Owner and VP of Sales for a local web development company in my area.  My interest in meeting with them was two fold; 1. determine if they could develop a website for me that I’m interested in having built and 2. see if they had any design clients that would be interested in having my company do SEO for them.  In meeting with them I found the answers I was looking for, but also found that these two fellas were also very interested in learning what I know about onsite SEO.  I find that is the case so often…design guys not knowing anything about onsite SEO.  You see most developers, programmers, designers that received a degree in school never really learn about SEO.  It’s not a subject covered in the course curriculum of most colleges so if they know it they have learned it on their own, and if they don’t know it then their design clients are getting the short end of the stick by ending up with site that is not search engine friendly.

With that in mind I suggest these 5 strategies below to help those designers that don’t know.

1.  Include unique page titles and meta data for each page on the site.  While meta descriptions and keywords don’t hold the clout they did years ago they are still important and should reference your targeted keywords for the given page.  I always recommend keeping the title simple and just using the targeted words in your title such as: Money Management - Household Budgeting Software - Online Budget.

2.  Make sure you use 301 redirects properly and apply them to all URL’s that need to be pointed back to your http://www.domain.com address.  Doing this helps the SERPs know which domain you want them to index.

3.  Don’t use only Flash!  Designers love Flash and so do I, but if you want to get indexed and rank well you need to have plain old content and text on your pages.  Using Flash to draw attention to a banner or something is fine, but make sure each page you want to rank well has at least 400 words on it.  You can create subpages in your site that target specific topics such as money management and load that page up with relevant content.

4.  Make sure your blog is search engine friendly as well by getting rid of the duplicate content issued that plague many blogging platforms.  Don’t link to your archives section and make sure you don’t post the same text in on multiple pages of the blog.

5.  Make sure to create an html sitemap that is linked to in the footer of the site.  This is very important for SERPs.

I hope these 5 simple things help improve your builds and most of all help your clients succeed.