It is strongly recommended that you backup your WordPress database at regular intervals and before an upgrade. Creating backups of your blog is very easy. You can do it directly from your WordPress Dashboard. You know you should do it regularly, but usually other activities get in the middle and you just forget about it.
The consequences of not backing up your blog are much more serious than you can imagine. If there is any problem with your server or your site’s hard disk fails, or your website get hacked, you will lose extremely valuable data. Although you can have an automatic backup service included in your hosting plan, many times they don’t save MySQL databases. So, to make sure you save your data, you can do the backup manually.
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The most common way that search engine robots find and spider a Blog is by following hyperlinks from other sites. In search engine terminology, these sites are known as
“found pages”. Some search engines also have a “submit URL” form, where you can suggest that they add your Blog to their index. Typically, you just give the primary URL for your site (like http://www.tandiltheme.com), and this address is added to their list of links to check and crawl.
There are some services that let you submit your site “automatically”. Currently, there are only four “major” search engines, and you can’t even submit to all of them. 95% of your search engine traffic will come from one of these major search engines. This is not really a good deal, even if it’s free. The same applies to software that submits your site to “thousands” of search engines. As I’ve just stated, only a few search engines actually matter. Using this software is more likely to generate a flood of junk email than anything else, so stay away of it.
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When you tweak your Blog, there are some basic rules that apply to designing your pages to be “search engine friendly”. Keep these rules in mind as you build your site, or you could be in for a lot of headaches and problems. All these rules have to do with creating a Blog that search engine bots and spiders can navigate and read easily. If you have no option, but to “break” one of these rules, you’ll need to sort out the details of making your content accessible to the search engines.
First Rule: Try to Avoid Frames.
Search engines don’t handle frames very well, so you’re better off avoiding the use of frames. If you must use them, simply create a “NOFRAMES” version of
your Blog that links all of your content together. But the best option is to avoid frames.
Second Rule: Flash, QuickTime, Add-ons, etc.
Search engine spiders actually can read and index Flash web sites. The problem is that they can’t really trust what they find in the Flash files, because there’s no easy way
to determine which text is visible. Designing your entire site in Flash is crazy from a usability standpoint. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use Flash, QuickTime, or other plug-ins selectively on your HTML web pages. You can. There are a lot of cool things you can do with embedded audio and video, or with the interactive elements that Flash can create. Just because search engines don’t see it, that doesn’t mean you can’t use it, but be picky and selective if you want to use those elements.
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