The importance of graphics in your blog

Hi bloggers, I’m sorry to day my post is going to be short because I’m so busy these days with my exams, wish me luck.

I’m talking to day about the importance of graphics in your blog, because many bloggers focus upon the contents of their blog, but it’s note the only way to attract visitors to your blog, a good blog design may also drive you traffic.

If your blog has a beautiful design and an attractive look will definitely make the visitor come back again, unfortunately the majority of bloggers forget this point and they don’t give it much concern that it deserve.

Im going here to propose some websites that offer you free blog templates for your Blogspot or WordPress, and some cool websites for nice graphics.

If you are a fan of WordPress, SmashingMagazine.com can provide you the latest information about web designers and developers and some really nice ready to use templates for your blog.

If you are using Blogger/blogspot you can find with Geckoandfly.com some pretty good templates for your blogspot.

When you need nice pictures you can visit these websites Deviantart.com, Blogcomics.net and Blaugh.com.

How to get listed in Google in less then a week

Once you start posting on your blog, the first thing you have to do to get traffic is you must submit your blog to different search engines and directories, Google is the most used search engine on the web, by submitting your blog to Google your blog will appear in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), this sounds nice, simple and easy?

But the sad truth my dear bloggers, is your blog will not appear in Google SERPs, even if it did you’ll find your blog in the tail of the search result.

How webmasters manage to make there blog listed in the 10 first places of the search queries that are relevant to there keywords within few weeks?

Big websites that are listed in Google has a high PR+5 (Page Rank), those websites are crawled more often then other websites with lower PR, it is a great opportunity for you to seize, try to find websites or blogs with high PR, and buy a backlink to your blog. This will cost you money.

You can have free backlinks to your blog from PR+5 or higher by writing comments including your blog address. Those kind of blogs are regularly crawled by Google, then the search engine will start spider your new blog, it is known for sure that if you have a backlink in a PR+7 website, your blog will be listed withing few days.

Here are the top 50 websites rated by PR you should submit your blog to.

1. dmoz.org PR9

2. portal.eatonweb.com PR8

3. stpt.com PR7

4. open-site.org PR7

5. lanic.utexas.edu PR7

6. gogreece.com PR6

7. polishworld.com PR6

8. 123india.com PR6

9. elib.org PR6

10. ezilon.com PR6

11. christiansunite.com PR6

12. aardvark.co.za PR6

13. payvand.com/yp/ PR6

14. findingblog.com PR6

15. canadopedia.com PR6

16. webworldindex.com PR5

17. info-listings.com PR5

18. vxbox.com PR5

19. zensearch.com PR5

20. imegamall.com PR5

21. canlinks.net PR5

22. searchsight.com PR5

23. dewa.com PR5

24. great-british-pages.co.uk PR5

25. jamjaa.com PR5

26. illumirate.com PR5

27. finditireland.com PR5

28. directory.ldmstudio.com PR5

29. global-weblinks.com PR5

30. worthwhilelink.com PR5

31. lii.org/pub/htdocs/home.htm PR4

32. blogrankings.com PR4

33. bloggernity.com PR4

34. bloguniverse.com PR4

35. sacentral.sa.gov.au/site/page PR4

36. businessweek.directorym.com PR4

37. toronto1.biz PR4

38. canadianeh.com PR4

39. bluedir.com PR4

40. josh.nu PR4

41. megri.com PR4

42. my-india.net PR4

43. pedsters-planet.co.uk PR4

44. slsites.com PR4

45. allfreethings.com PR4

46. uk-web-index.co.uk PR4

47. podcastzoom.com PR3

48. femina.com PR3

49. siteranking.com PR3

50. gimpsy.com PR3

How to drive massive traffic to your blog

Getting traffic to your blog is the hardest part of the blog journey and definitely the most frustrating job ever, but it’s the only way to get a good traffic to your blog without spending any money, in other words you have to invest your time and effort to get what you want.

There are many ways to drive decent traffic to your blog, in this post I’ll give you the easiest ways, but keep in mind it takes time to see the fruits of your labour.

SEO (Search Engine optimization) .

The internet is a wide place and it’s getting wider day after day, there are thousands of blogs and websites that have good quality contents, it’s a wild competition going on out there you have to play hardball as well.

Submitting your blog to deferent search engine websites like Google, Yahoo, Live and others is the first step to get you started, then you should optimize your blog so it appears in the first top 10 places of the search result, you can do that by making your blog appears in other blogs or websites that have high Page Rank (directories, partners or friends..), and using relevant keywords in the Meta tag on your HTML code.

On your post titles try to think of most things that people always look for like “how to drive traffic, or how to recover your system files etc …”

Backlink is important to SEO and an effective way to drive traffic to your blog, it is also known as inbound links (links that are referring toward your blog or website from other websites), the number of backlinks indicate the popularity of your blog, search engines like Google measures your blog by the number of appearance in other blogs or websites and gives you more credit than other blogs ,it means your blog will get to the 10 first places of the search query, the more inbound links you have the more traffic you’ll get.

For more tips about SEO visit this link.

Social bookmarking websites.

Social bookmarking websites are becoming more popular, and it has the power to drive you traffic more then what you expect, so if you didn’t submit your blog yet, and you have posts that rock, I strongly advice you to do so to more than one social bookmarking website.

Here are the best bookmarking website you may start with, rated by popularity:

Stumbleupon.com to me is the number one social bookmarking site you can find what ever you want (videos, blogs, images, …) by categories and it’s all submitted and rated by the community.

Digg.com is a place for people to discover and share contents from anywhere on the web, so it’s the coolest place for any blogger to submit a summery about his post and link to his blog and let people digg your posts.

Delicious with delicious you can bookmark your posts and your friends posts and you can share with the world your favourite articles, blogs, music, reviews and more.

I hope you find these tips useful, if you have any questions or comments I’ll be happy to read them and answer as soon as I can good luck

Duplicate contents, every blogger’s nightmare

I think my fellow bloggers will agree that every blogger’s worst nightmare is duplicate contents, when you have kicking posts and you update your blog regularly, a great problem comes to the surface, I don’t mean to scar you but seriously it is, the problem is - is your contents original or stolen?

Recently search engines try to filter stolen contents in order to remove them from the search results, because they want to provide users with unique contents, but the foxy webmasters make different copies with different names to deceive the search engines, this filter is so paranoid sometimes it removes original contents from the search queries.

How duplicate contents filter works?

When the search engine’s robot crawls to your website, it stores all your website information on its database and compares them with other existing information, depending on the relevancy score of your website and other factors, the search engine decides which are duplicate contents and which are not, then it filters out the pages from the search results.

How to overcome duplicate contents?

There isn’t really a way to get rid of duplicate posts, but that’s not going to stop you from taking preventive measures to avoid this issue and make search engines know that your contents is original, for instance you can go to Copyscape.com to look for copies of your pages, then flag them as stolen.

You can also include a copyright notice or a warning banner in each page of your blog to assert ownership over your contents.

Sometimes adding your own comment to your post can help you avoid the inconvenience.

There is more about this issue in Google Webmaster Central Blog.

If you’ve faced this situation before, you’ve overcame it and you want to share your precious information with us, please leave comments.