I came across a really simple but sensible bit of information.
According to some well respected authorities web search engines are programmed to look for the following on every site, including blogs, and those sites that don’t have them all will be ranked less well than a comparable site that does have them.
- About page
- a privacy policy
- a profile picture – a picture of the author creates confidence
- easily-found contact info – physical location info – not full postal address but town and country is normally enough
Does your site have them? If not then you might want to look at it pronto.
I get emails from people who want to know if Start Something Today accepts guest posts. The simple answer is yes but we are very selective. These guidelines are just that – guidelines – if you have an idea then e mail me and we can discuss it.
As a general rule I will only publish one Guest Post a week. So the next question is – What kind of content do we accept?
The general principle is that it has to add value to our readers. Things that are related to doing business – we even let you occasionally promote your own business. It can be related to business ideas, creative ideas, blogging, Internet marketing in general, and it can also be derived from your own personal experiences. There is no minimum length for your post, but usually the guest posts have over 500 words.
Guidelines
- Your post must be original and must have never been published before on the Internet
- You agree to not publish the post anywhere else (i.e., in your own blog or as a guest post in other blogs)
- You can include up to two links in the byline, which will be displayed at the bottom of the post
- You can’t use SEOd anchor text for your links
How do I submit my guest post? We prefer to set you up as a contributor or possibly an editor but that all depends on your content.
If you have a post that meets the guidelines above, you can send it to me on the email paulatstart-something-today.com – if you click on the guest writer image that will take you to my e mail. Usually within 48 hours I will reply stating if we will accept the guest post or not. If I reject your post, you are obviously free to use it in your own blog or to propose it as a guest post to some other website.
One of the most poorly understood terms in use on the Internet today is the term avatar. Let me begin by explaining where the term came from originally. Apparently the term is derived from the Sanskrit word which is to do with Eastern religions which means ‘a representation of one’s self’ in other words a picture, an image or a representation of the person concerned. The modern derivation or application of the term avatar is almost exclusively connected with the use of computers, the Internet, Internet gaming and blogs in particular. Many services like MSN Messenger, Yahoo, AIM and Skype actually encourage you to have an image of yourself. They seem to work better if the image is of the person concerned. A picture of you has been shown to encourage confidence.
Probably the most common outworking of the avatar format is by using on of a number of free services that link a particular e-mail to a particular image and that image is stored on the Internet at one such service and probably the one most commonly used in the blogging community is a service called Gravatar (www.Gravatar.com) allows you to go and register an e-mail address and then upload a small picture related to the e-mail address. Then whenever you go and post a comment or write an entry on the blog then provided you use that e-mail address then that image that you’ve linked to the e-mail address will pop up in the post or comment. There are many examples of that all over the internet.
Now why is it important to use Gravatars when you’re working on the Internet? We all know the search engines love back links to your site and search engines like Google view them as very important. So let’s say that you have a chosen area and niche area looking for example high performance sailing. If you go and search on the Internet for blogs containing the phrase high performance sailing. Once you find a good site you post a helpful comment and in doing so are asked to provide your e mail and are given the option of providing a web address. Provided your comment is accepted by the owner of the blog then two things happened one is you get a back link to your site which is all cute importance of the just mentioned and secondly your image gets placed adjacent in the comments (if your image is good then people may well click on it. The more you place relevant comments on other peoples blogs the more likely your website is to gain that elusive goal – an elevated Google PR rank. There are no hard and fast rules regarding the number of back links that you need in order to step up from say a Google rank of 0 to 1 to 2, then 2 to 3 and so on but every back link that you have brings you closer to that elusive goal.
Wherever you see an invitation to post a comment on a blog where they require you to put an e mail address to validate the poster then there is a probability that the site is enabled to use Avatars/Gravatars. Each comment that you post acts as a valuable back link. It is for just this reason that spammers try to post comments by the hundred in blogs and on forums.
This weeks recommendation is in two parts:
- go to www.gravatar.com and register – it is free. For each email address you want to use just have a small image – preferably different to upload.
- then make a decision to visit one blog (search on Google for ones similar to your niche) and post a helpful comment. The box on “start something today” looks like this but you may only see a ‘Comments’ link on some sites.
You may have created the best website in the world and have the product everyone wants or needs but unless you get found by the search engines then it will take months if not years to build the traffic to your site. We talked in the past about Squidoo (if you are not yet registered click the preceding link) , Gumtree, US Free Ads, backlinks, signatures, business cards but just this last weekend I came across a post on a website that I follow that was very interesting and can be massively helpful in generating traffic.
Before I share with you the site I just want you to think about something really important. If you come across something really good you have 3 options 1. keep it to yourself , 2. share it with others close to you or option 3. copy it and pretend you are the author.
Options 1. is plain selfish and can’t be justified. Option 2 is OK but you don’t really get the best return and option 3 – well it is not the right thing to do.
The post I found this weekend is on a site called Maxblogpress.com and has been a site that I’ve watched and used for several years. It is foccsed on wordpress blogs and has produced some great little ideas but the article today is all about being found by the search engines and is so topical today that I can’t tell you how excited i am about it all. It shows you how to get several key websites to list your sites and thatway get more traffic and more potential sales. The post to go and have a look at is called how to be listed by killer startups.
If you want go and have a look at killerstartups.com
makes very interesting reading and is well worth the time to explore. Please also sign up for the Maxblogpress.com newsletter which has been of consistently high quality.
