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.
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.
There has been much talked about Mentors and their roles. However, how many people in business have one and really understand how to get the best out of them. Having a mentor is all about having a 2 way relationship, a conversation, that enables and facilitates accountability. A mentor is:
not all mentors need to look like this
- approachable – can you walk with them or they walk with you
- experienced
- easy to talk with and listen to
- often the one person who will ask the difficult questions
- encourages self development
- models good behaviour
- hold you accountable for actions, choices and decisions
- probably slightly disconnected from what you are creating
A mentor is not:
- not infallible
- is not a scapegoat for things that don’t go as we want
- available endlessly – there has to be some movement
Mentoring is about one person helping another to achieve something of real importance to them. It is about giving help and support in a non-threatening way, in a manner that the recipient will appreciate and value and that will empower them to move forward with confidence towards what they want to achieve. Mentoring is also concerned with creating an informal environment in which one person can feel encouraged to discuss their needs and circumstances openly and in confidence with another person who is in a position to be of positive help to them.
Mentors are probably confined to helping in a relatively narrow area and you may actually have several mentors at any one time each of whom assists in a different area.
One concept of a mentor is a person who holds up a mirror and annoyingly asks those questions that you might not have asked yourself.
A mentor might be someone who is around for just a few short months or may be much longer term – it all depends on the area you are working in.
So the call to action for today is this. Who is your mentor? Do they know it? How often do you talk with them about the important things you are trying to create?
