Tips Tuesday – Backup Tips, AI Crawler Resources, Video Audio Gear
Tips this week include:
- Why I have contracts
- Why it’s great that clients ask first
- A few recent service request examples
- Backups are your best security
- Fast themes test results
- AI crawler bots draining host resources – or do they?
- Google does a tweak a minute on Search
- New video SEO series coming
- Audio is also important in videos – and the gear I use
Happy April Fool’s Day, y’all!! And it’s the beginning of Q2. Let’s rock this!
BlogAid Happenings
Why I Have Contracts
A situation happened that took over every day and night of my life last week. It involved fallen trees and forest flood debris on 7 lots, including mine. (I live in a heavily wooded area with super old trees and lots of houses that circle a big meadow.)
All I’m going to say about it here is to check your property lines if they are not already clearly marked. (Because of the circle around the meadow, the lines here are goofy.)
And ensure that all involved in any clearing have an agreement, that is recorded in some manner, about who does what, where, and when.
Also check the agreement with whoever you hire to ensure what their responsibility is and that everyone is okay with them working across property lines no matter who is paying for it, even if it is split between multiple parties.
This is precisely why I have contracts with my site audit clients because their website is online property and the work we do is a partnership.
The contract outlines their obligations as well as mine, and the liabilities for each of us.
The designers and vendors I recommend have similar contracts too.
Never just sign anything. Read it and ensure you agree to all of the terms and can meet any obligations assigned to you.
Ask First
One of the clauses in my contract for site audit clients who are in the Hub membership for extra support is that they need to ask me first before they make a change to their site that may impact speed or security, or if they are creating new sites and/or terminating a site.
For new plugins, they ask in our Facebook group to get recommendations from the village.
I’ve never said no to any of the changes.
However, I do help my clients avoid expensive mistakes or help them find better/cheaper ways to do something. Same with asking about things in our private group – we help each other with our collective “been there, done that” experience.
And that’s the point.
I have the opportunity to advise before the action is taken.
And that means all throughout the year I still know what state their site is in between audit checkups and I know that any changes or such that I send out for them to do, or I need to do for them, will be okay and not bork anything.
Plus, I know that their site security has not been compromised by a 3rd-party designer who is unfamiliar with proper security measures, or from a new site setup that was not secured from the get go or such. These, and much more, are just some of the surprises I found during their next audit checkup prior to changing my contracts to get permission first.
I lost a few clients over that contract change. But I gained some stressless sanity over it too.
As mentioned, I’ve never said no to a requested change. My only goals are to help my clients stay safe, fast, and as trouble-free as possible, and to make all the money they can with their sites.
A Few Request Examples
Here are just a few of the things I helped my clients create or change recently:
- Setup alt email to take requests from another referring site. I advised that we can set up that email, but rather than give that other site that email to display, which will get spammed to death because they don’t have good security and bot protection, it would be better give them a link to a contact form on her properly secured site that is specifically for taking those requests, and then send that form result to that new alt email to make it simple for seeing and tracking. The client was able to do all of it on their own. And with GA4, she can track the referring hits to that form from the other site.
- Request to set up alias email on different domain. Since both domains are for related sites that she owns, I advised using the same Workspace account instead of paying for another one, as you can have emails from different domains configured as an alias. I do that with all of my sites on my master BlogAid Workspace account. It’s way cheaper and allows me to see all emails in their own “folders” by domain within the same Workspace account. In a live session I set up all of the DNS records and verifications and watched over the shoulder as the client configured the new Workspace email and added a new label for it.
- Request to sunset WP site and move posts to Substack, plus change domain-related email provider. We did a consult for the SEO ramifications of this change. And then I made a to-do list for the order of all the changes including who does what and when.
- Theme change request. We had a quick consult to see the new theme she was thinking about using. I was able to show her a way to easily get that same look on the theme she already has (both are Kadence themes). That’s going to save her a WHALE of a lot of money and will be way faster and easier than setting up a dev site and having a new theme customized and then migrated in. We may still want a dev site, depending on how much she wants to play with tweaks. But that’s fast and cheap to do. She can just take notes of what she did and then do them on the live site with no theme migration required.
- Revamping whole business structure request. We had a consult to get the details on a plan that would merge 3 businesses. And then we had a consult to go over the minutiae details of the overview plan we made for how to get it done.
- Special Cloudflare rule request. A client has an AI chatbot service that needs to allow their bot to have access to the site and our security settings were blocking it. A new Allow rule required a special Value/Key pair and to be placed in such a way that it takes priority over other security rules.
- Table of Content plugin recommendation. In our group I advised when and when not to use them and the SEO and monetization pros/cons of them.
- Failed auto backups. This ended up being somewhat widespread and we were able to know that because of the folks reporting in. We also were able to find the fixes faster. While this was not a permission type of request, it shows the power of a village and how having a central reporting place helps everyone.
Need Help?
See the BlogAid Services page for all the things I can help you with on your site and related accounts.
That includes consults to talk through your plans and find the best way to implement them.
Or becoming a site audit client and getting the help you need from the whole village.
And see the eCreators Hub Service page for any help you need with memberships, ecommerce, and metrics.
Security Tips
Backups are Your Best Security
Yesterday was World Backup Day.
A solid backup plan is your last security net. No matter what other catastrophe strikes, you still have all of your data to restore things to normal.
Here are a few tips for ensuring your data is backed up everywhere.
Website
See my Backup Checklist to ensure you’re getting everything in your site’s backup and that the frequency matches your site changes but doesn’t overtax your hosting.
And, check that your backup is working and that the files are going into storage.
Computer
I use BackBlaze for my PC. It works with Mac too. I have mine set for daily incremental backups, which don’t really load my system when I’m working on it. There may be cheaper services than this, but check how awful doing a restore from them may be. If you ever have to restore your whole machine, you won’t care what you paid if it takes days to get it all uploaded.
Mobile Devices
Once a quarter I check my iPad and iPhone to ensure they don’t have a bunch of junk on them. That’s especially true for my phone because I may install an app on my iPad that I don’t need on the phone.
Then I back both of them up to my computer via iTunes. And then those files get backed up to BackBlaze.
Theme Tips
Fast Themes Test Results
A few years ago I ran deep speed tests on multiple themes and builders including Astra, Kadence, Genesis, Elementor, and Divi.
And several of my site audit clients use the GeneratePress theme, which I get to see speed results on during those audits.
From my tests, I can tell you the fastest themes are, in order:
- GeneratePress
- Kadence
- Astra
- Genesis
Elementor and Divi were horrible for speed. And despite how much they have tried to improve them, you still have to throw the kitchen sink of optimization at them to get them as fast as where all the others started before any further optimization was applied.
Recently, Kyle Van Deusen tested over 150 real agency sites to see which ones performed best.
And I’m delighted to share that my list still stands.
Now, while GeneratePress is among the fastest, that’s because it’s also one of the plainest. You have to do a LOT of CSS styling to make it pretty. But, if plain is what you want, you can get it with this theme. It’s also well supported.
There are other themes on Kyle’s list that are as fast, but they aren’t on my list for good reasons. Take the Bricks theme, for example. It has a ton of SEO and optimization built in that will goof with what you’re already using for those things, and the theme’s way of doing it is not as good.
So, speed most certainly can’t be the only factor you consider in a theme.
My top recommendation remains Kadence. It looks nice from the get-go and it is a designer’s dream to work with. Plus, they are always innovating and it is well supported.
And my favorite Kadence designer is Michelle Phillips of Codefetti. She can make it look any way you want and still keep it super fast and accessibility compliant too.
SEO Tips
AI Crawler Bots Draining Host Resources
I read through the article and don’t know which websites are being hit like that, but me and my clients have been carefully monitoring the AI bot hits, and I’ve been monitoring their hosting resources and we have not encountered this issue.
One of my client’s sites got hit with 43,000 OpenAI crawler bot hits in a 24 hour period. I freaked out over that until I had a look at the hosting resource usage for bandwidth, CPU, and I/O and didn’t see an alarming peak on them that would have limited resource usage.
That’s what hosts are set up to do. They auto trigger a governor when they see a sustained peak in resource usage, as they are trying to protect your site from a bad bot attack. Cloudflare does the same, and protects your site before the bots even hit your hosting.
A Tweak a Minute
There are 525,600 minutes in a year.
Google runs 700,000 tests per year to find things to tweak in their algorithm, according to this recap of John Mueller’s presentation at the recent Search Central Live NYC event.
There are 4,700 major algorithm updates a year, and 10x that of minor tweaks.
That averages out to nearly a tweak a minute.
For all the testing and tweaking they do, we’ve only seen Google Search get progressively worse over the last few years.
And this is why:
- I teach solid foundation SEO techniques in the DIY SEO Everywhere course that work on all platforms.
- We need to look beyond Google Search for our traffic and learn and incorporate the SEO things that are specific to them.
YouTube SEO Workshops Coming Next Week
I’m putting together a new series of workshops in the DIY SEO Everywhere course for video.
And we’re going to start with YouTube.
The first one will be on our Channel settings, as those have changed significantly in the last year.
I’ll have a checklist that we’ll go over in a live workshop so everyone can be sure they have the most up-to-date settings, including all of the new ones.
And that will also serve as a good checklist for folks who are creating a new channel.
The series will also include workshops on the videos themselves. I’m betting I’ll be breaking that up into at least 2 workshops for researching trends and what’s working so we can build an editorial calendar, and then tricks for how to get the most out of strategically using both Shorts and long-form content to get max reach and money.
New Video SEO Series Coming
I’m thinking we need a workshop/mastermind on Meta videos, especially all of the confusion on how Reels are used/shared between different Meta platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Threads.
And then maybe a session on product videos for platforms like Etsy and Shopify and such.
Maybe by then we’ll have some clarity on whether TikTok will still be around and do sessions on it too.
What kind of video workshops/masterminds do you want? Let me know in our private Facebook group for the DIY SEO Everywhere course.
Video Tips
Audio is Also Important
Making a good video includes having clear audio, if you’re speaking.
I make all of the BlogAid tutorials at my desk and I use an ATR 2100 USB mic for those. It’s the same mic I use during DIY SEO live workshops too.
But, for my Heartwood Art tutorials, I use a mix of mics.
When I’m doing a voiceover on previously recorded footage, I use that same ATR 2100.
When I’m doing intros/outros in my woodshop, I was using the Rode boom mic that came with my Canon M50. You can hear it on my Starter Tools post where I’m sitting about 6 ft away in a rather reflective room.
But, I loathe using that camera. It’s fantastic, when set up correctly, but it never seems to hold those settings, even when I put them at the default. Or, I have to get a new white and light balance between recording during the day or night.
I tried using my phone, but it just can’t hold all of that footage, and the mic situation was hard to set up.
So, I got a super simple, point-and-shoot video camera that works like my phone, and auto balances the light and focus, like my phone too. No settings to check and no problems to fix, or reshoot.
But there is no place to mount my Rode boom mic either. Plus, I wanted a better sound in that boomy part of my garage.
So, I got one of those Bluetooth lav mics that I see so many TikTok creators using. It has a universal receiver that can plug into my video camera or my phone. And it sounds fantastic!!!!
It also has super noise cancellation so it won’t pick up the roar of it raining outside like that Rode did.
And that’s super important because it’s going to be raining at some point every day and night this week. So no yard work. And I want to get into my shop to get my first build and new tutorials made!
You can check out my cameras and mics in the Recording Gear section of the Shop Tools page on Heartwood Art.
