How to create an excellent 'About me' page for blogger

When it comes to putting together a powerful website or blog, every page is important. Yet many people seem to overlook the most important pages like “About me” page, and thereby commit a big mistake.

If you are here means you are so lucky that you are not committing that mistake that many others are doing. It is so true that many people want to know about you and your ability to solve their problem. If you are not sure of how to make “About me” page don’t get tensed as I will explain about some important elements of this page.

What is an “About me” page?

An about page of a website or a blog contains some important information about your Website/Service or organization. This single page speaks about Who you are, what you can do and why this website. This is a place where you talk about you and show your achievement and strong points. Of all the elements of a website, “About us” or “About me” page is one of the most important elements.

Some of the elements you should keep in mind before making an “About me” page are:

Maintain Human Touch:

Always remember it’s a point of connection between your readers and you. So, you might like to maintain the human touch, add some funny comments and also maintain the professionalism at the same time. You can start with your blog foundation, vision, what do you do, and what action they can take next.

Keep it Focused:

The main reason people will visit your “About Me” page is to find out more about who you are, and why you are the right person to solve their problem. You don’t need to write an autobiography to achieve this.

Make this page short and sweet by giving the people a little background about yourself, your qualifications and your expertise in an engaging manner.

Never ever lie to your readers:

Many people make the biggest mistake of bragging about them to make their page or biography look good. But, remember a bad reputation spreads like light! So, never lie to your readers and tell them frankly about yourself and your skills and achievements.

Keep your personal stuff aside:

This page should be more professional rather than personal. Keep your personal stuff like your hobbies, things you like etc.., away from this page. They should be presented in your social networking profile. Add a picture of yourself; tell them about your educational background and the reason behind to start this blog or website.

Think from a reader perspective:

You should think from a reader perspective view more than an author’s. You should think about what they are expecting from you. Sometimes they might be interested in connecting to you through social networking. So, give them the links of your personal profile and fan pages if any.

I think you are now ready to make your own “About me” page. Please feel free to let me know if I had missed any important aspect through the comment box below.

5 Mistakes to avoid while using and starting a blog

A good number of people are interested in starting a new blog in this highly developing internet era. Some of them had taken it as a hobby while some as a daily profession. However as we know that nothing is easy, it also is applicable for blogging. Plan before you act as there are many things that you cannot modify or change when once done. A number of essential parameters are there that are to be considered before starting a new blog while some of them are discussed here in this post. Many new bloggers end up in taking those steps that are to be avoided while blogging. So, here in this post I would like to point out those aspects which are to be avoided preferably.

Let’s have a look at some of the commonly committed mistakes while starting a new blog:

Settle Down for the Best Niche and Stick to it!

The first thing you need to keep in mind in order to become a successful blogger is to settle down for the best niche. Most of the time new bloggers take up random topics and start to blog on those random topics. This approach usually fails to create an impact in the blogging field and make them to quit blogging. Do some research on the niche before taking up the task of blogging as it is one of the major aspects in the process of blogging. So, make sure that you settle down for the right and best niche.

Don’t Start a Blog Merely for Money

There are a number of new bloggers who start a blog for earning some quick money. However they are not successful in either getting money or getting the considerable amount of traffic. Stick to the topic and provide a good, useful and interesting content to attract more number of visitors and thereby earning money through monetising your blog. It is always advisable to concentrate more on the content and other aspects related to it rather than thinking in earning point of view. Your earnings start easily if you have considerable amount of daily traffic.

Say ‘No’ to Plagiarism

Plagiarism means copying the content from other blogs and websites and posting it on your blog. In simple words the using of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V combinations. Some of the new bloggers who usually don’t want to put in some hard work in research about a particular problem or topic follow these shortcut ways. During the starting days it will be easy but as the time goes on they face the difficulties in that shortcut path. The quality of the content is the main root of the blog. So, don’t opt for any shortcut ways for the blog content. Do some research before posting something on your blog and your aim should be is to generate good quality original content.

Don’t fall for Showy or Garish Blog Designs

One of the major mistakes bloggers generally commit is to fall for showy template designs. Most of the times they tend to use fancy and colourful templates. However these templates lack the official look. Many readers may find it difficult to read your posts and may also miss the important content and complain about the appearance of your blog. So it is always advisable to stick with a highly professional and simple light kind of template. It may increase the chance of getting more number of return visitors.

Avoid Complex Categorizing and Tagging

Categories and tags usually refer to the table of contents of your blog. They help the visitors or readers to find the content needed to them with ease. This is another aspect in which most of the new bloggers tend to make mistakes in.

The problem with them is that they fail to understand the mere purpose of categories and tags is to simplify your blog visitor’s visit to your blog. They try to use the maximum number of keywords related to the post that may result in a huge number of tags which is so confusing. 

Many a time in the process of keeping things organized, new bloggers forget to take into consideration this parameter, which is exactly why categories and tags come out to be of no use to them. This is why you need to be very careful while choosing categories and tags. Maintain balance while using these parameters. You must plan categories well in advance as they need to possess a meaning. On the other hand the tags that you need must be based on the keywords that are likely to be searched by the visitors.

So, if you are starting a new blog try to avoid these aspects. If you already started blogging stick with your niche and avoid making mistakes like changing the theme or posting something that is not related to your niche or the theme.

If you think there are also other aspects that are need to be discussed but are left, please feel free to let me know by posting in the comment section below. I wish you all the best and for a grand success in the field of blogging.

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Submit your site to Search engines like Google and Bing.

The first step to getting your site online and to get better rankings in Google is to submit your URL to search engines. An example of an URL is www.blogger.com. Eventually the search engines will find your site but this will help expedite the process.

Once you submit your URL, it could take several days, weeks, or months for the search engines to index your page(s). Results may vary so don’t write this in stone. Factors such as other websites pointing to your site can affect this time as well.

Submitting to Google:

 1. Go to the following link: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

2. Type in your URL, example: http://www.yoursite.com

3. Enter comments about your site. This is optional. Usually I enter the genre of the site and a few keywords. Example: Blogger tips and tricks.

4. Enter the captcha text shown in the box

5. Select “Add URL”

 Submitting to Bing:

 1. Go to the following link: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

2. Enter the captcha text shown in the box

3. Type in your URL, example: http://www.yoursite.com

4. Select “Submit URL”

 Ask does not have an URL submit feature. Until recently, you could submit your sitemap to them. But Ask.com has now retired this feature and says they will be crawling sites instead. So, the next best thing is to add a directive in your robots.txt file that specifies auto-discovery of the XML sitemap.Like this:SITEMAP: http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml. The sitemap location should be the full sitemap URL.

That’s it! Once you complete the above steps, just sit back and be patient. It takes time for the search engines to index your pages. If you submit more than once, some search engines may consider this spamming which could result in not indexing your site at all.

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5 'essentials' that blogger should concentrate on!

So you want to become a popular blogger in your niche?

 Well your popularity begins with the blog topic you choose to blog about, since people must first have an interest in the subject they want to post. The fact is that people read blogs not out of loyalty to the blogger but rather for the information it provides. The 'role' of the blogger is to create content that is relevant and interesting enough to get return visitors.

Here are the 5 'essentials' elements you should concentrate on, if you hope to get return visitors:

Content:

Content is the main soul of the blog. Your content should be relevant enough to attract more number of visitors. In three simple words your content needs to be useful, relevant and informative! Remember people read blogs out of curiosity and interest and if you can't provide updates that satisfy their needs, you will be facing some problems concerning the visitors!

Commitment towards your blog:

It is important to realize that even the top blogging sites took plenty of time to establish a large and loyal following! Loyalty does not occur overnight therefore the efforts you do invest need to be long term since blogging is a process!

Effort:

You should put maximum effort to establish a loyal following. Your effort should be in the right direction. You should take good care of the amount of time available with you for maintaining your blog. You have to update your blog with posts more often to attract more number of return visitors. Remember not to change the topic or field of the blog in course of time. It would be foolish and damaging to the growth of your blog!

Navigation:

Working hard to develop content around the blog topic you've chosen only makes sense to make it all available to visitors. Arrange your posts into categories while also linking together any posts that contain related or relevant information. This makes navigation on your site more easy and make the visitors to spend more amount of time on your blog.

Hospitality:

A large part of the popularity associated with blogging platforms is the ability for people to interact by leaving comments! If you want to be a good blogger you should allow people to share their opinions and their thoughts towards the content provided by you. Most of the people who read blogs assume and expect that they can also participate as well, so don't disappoint them!

To become one of the top blogging sites in any niche, there needs to be a certain commitment by the blogger, as described above in the 5 ‘essentials’ we discussed. Over time your efforts will result in building a loyal following along with reputation as being one of the top blogging sites.

If you have more information regarding the essential components for a blog please feel free to post through the comment box below.

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How to out stand your blogging competition

Have you ever thought of standing first out of the competition among all the blogs? Did you know there are a number of essential ways to beat the other bloggers by becoming a better blogger?

The most critical ways to out-blog other blogs are described below. The best part is that they are all free and you can begin implementing them as part of your blogging journey immediately.

1. Be More Useful

Make your blog so useful to visitors that they can’t resist themselves from visiting it. And also make them feel that not visiting would mean they could miss something very important or big. Always keep in mind, usefulness comes first and is available in a lot of different forms, shapes, and sizes. Your blog could be useful because it delivers breaking news, health-tips, blogging-tips, in-depth tutorials, expert advice, and more. Even entertainment can be useful for people who want and need it. Check out other blogs and figure out how you can be more useful, and then deliver that added value of usefulness on an ongoing basis.

2. Be More Trustworthy and Reliable

If people can trust that your blog will deliver that useful information they need, and they can rely on you, they'll come back again and again. If you can be more trustworthy and reliable than other blogs, then you'll be able to beat them by attracting and retaining more visitors.

3. Look Better

Your blog design should match your theme and also the promise to visitors. Make sure you live up to it by playing and looking the part in every interaction and experience that people have with your blog through comments or any other means. Confusion is a big enemy to bloggers, so make sure your blog is consistent in every way. Select a good blog design that sets expectations immediately when people visit.

4. Get Better Connections and More of Them

You should always build good relationships with your blog visitors and with people across the social web. Also, connect with other bloggers who can help to boost your online content by sharing them either directly or indirectly. These relationships help to increase sharing of your blog content, boost conversations about your blog, jump start comments for each of your blog posts, and there-by increasing traffic to your blog.

5. Care More

You should care more about your blog. That means you should take care about:

Ø  Your visitors by acknowledging them when they publish comments on your blog posts, thanking them for sharing your content with their own audiences, responding to their email messages, and so on.

Ø  Your content by publishing consistently with useful and trustworthy information on a reliable basis that meets your audience's expectations.

Ø  Your blog's performance by monitoring your traffic and publishing more of the type of content your audiences wants.

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Best blogging tips

When starting a successful blog, you must learn to be consistent and patient. Consistency is a major factor because you must provide fresh information that will engage readers on a regular basis. In order to gain readers and create a successful blog, you must also be patient. It can take time for your blog to catch on.

Title of the post

Ensure that the titles of your blog posts are very catchy. Imagine that you are someone who is just browsing the internet and you see your blog post among thousands of others. You should ensure that your blog headline sticks out from the rest of the blog posts.

Length of the post

If you have a very long post, divide it into smaller parts, posted with the title and part number. If a reader finds the first part engaging, they will be enticed to return for further parts. Doing so also ensures that your readers do not become overwhelmed by an especially lengthy post.

Stick with the content

Try to make sure that you are always writing with your readers in mind. Do not partake in keyword stuffing where you throw a ton of keywords into your blogs to get the search engines attention. Ultimately, your content and writing style will have the final say in whether your blog succeeds or not.

Maintain consistency

Make sure that you consistently post when running a blog. If you don't post content regularly, then your site traffic will diminish fairly quickly. Have a guestbook or contact information posted as well, so your audience can interact and provide feedback. If your readers are happy with your response, they are more likely to come back.

Don’t get too involved in formatting

Don't go crazy with font styles, capitalizing, underlining, bolding and the like. While it is important to use formatting appropriately, too much formatting makes everything merge together on the page. Only use special font styles when you really need to draw the reader's attention to a particular word or thought.

Take a note

Everything you do can end up being the subject of a blog. Take notes when you are away from the computer, if you stumble across an idea that may translate into a post. You should always keep your eyes open for subject ideas. Writing is the easy part, it's coming up with the initial concept that usually leads to writer's block.

Comments

You'll need to decide if you want to publish all comments as they come in, or whether to hold them for approval before they appear on your site.

Now that you are more aware, do not hesitate to put these insights to work for you immediately. Successful Blogging can be enjoyable, if you take the time to do it with sincerity and knowledge. Start today and reap the benefits that are possible with the insights provided.

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How to add 'About the author' at the end of every post

Steps to follow to add about the author below post:

Step 1: Go to your blogger dashboard>>edit template>>expand widget template.(Backup your template first)

Step 2: Now find the below code  on it. Use “ctrl+f” for that one.

<data:post.body/>

You will get this code on two places sometimes you will get this code in more than three places.

Step 3: Now add the below given code in below the line you find  in step 2 in any one. You just have to change the colors given in code and than add it.

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<div class="about-author">
<h3>About Author:</h3>
<img align="left" src=" paste url of your image here ">
</img>
<p>
 Write something about yourself</p>
<p>Follow him @ <a href="http://twitter.com/yourtwittername" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/facebookfanpagename" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Facebook</a></p>
</div>
</b:if>

Step 4: Before adding this code just do the simple modifications in highlighted colours.

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How to improve SEO to improve search results

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), everybody wants to be on the same page: Page One.

And why not?

The benefits of consistently showing up first on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Ask, and other search engines are obvious. Businesses of all sizes and across all industries recognize the value and benefits of an optimized blog, such as: increased number of visitors. Better brand recognition. Potentially higher transactions and sales, and potentially increased market share.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means organizing your blog and writing your articles with search engines like Google in mind. Your goal is to have your blog placed highly in search results (the top slots on the first page). I'm not an SEO expert, but I try to:

·                     Pay attention to SEO. Good content will generate good links and viewers, but writing titles and text with keywords in mind will improve SEO.

·                     Make SEO friendly links. When you link your Facebook page, you should link to the keywords instead of saying, check out my Facebook page here.

·                     Switch the order of the blog title. Blogger posts show up in search results as Name of Blog | Name of Article, but a more SEO-friendly post would have the name of the article first. Here's how to optimize title tags for SEO in Blogger.

·                     Make images SEO friendly by renaming them. Search engines will crawl image file names, so it's better to save files as “relevantkeyword.jpg” than IMG_2.jpg. This is particularly helpful for you as the search pages will show your blog by these key words.

·                     Tag photos with "title" and "alt" text. I take advantage of Blogger's "Properties" tags, which allow me to add additional text that is picked up by search engines. To get to the Properties box, click the Properties tag on the menu bar that shows up when you add an image.

Clicking on it will open this form, which I fill with SEO-friendly text:

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How to generate good traffic for your blog

Generating good or considerable blog traffic is one of the most important responsibilities of any blogger must address! Of course right up there with building traffic to your blog is writing content for visitors to read but for the sake of this discussion, the focus will be on getting as much traffic as you can!

Here are 5 suggestions any blogger can use when writing content that will help you get more traffic to your blog!

Appeal To Different Interests

This is to simply say try and cover a wider scope of topics that are relevant to your blogging theme. By doing so you'll attract a wider range of visitors which translates into more traffic to your blog. Now narrowing your focus is NOT a bad thing but it does tend to filter out many who may have an interest in other aspects of what you write about! The bottom line is writing content with either a very narrow focus or a more broader range of appeal takes the same amount of effort! A good blogger will find a way to attract more visitors without investing more effort!

Optimize Each Post

If getting more traffic to your blog is of interest to you than you do NOT want to overlook what search engines can do for you! This means you need to focus on properly optimizing your posts when writing content by correctly placing the most relevant keywords within the body of your entries! Search engines will now have a way to identify what you've composed and present it to people looking for information like what you have written! The result is you will have visitors showing up at your site with a genuine interest in the subject matter you offer!

Take Your Que From Comments

Learn to monitor the discussions taking place on your site and take note of what readers are talking about! This is a terrific way to keep your loyal followers happy while also enticing them to refer your platform to their friends and colleagues! This is one of the best ways any good blogger can use to create additional ideas to write about!

Circulate Online

One thing you should be doing is to visit other blogs, forums and social sites to see what's new and to also leave your link! This will help you pick up new ideas you can use from other platforms as well as increase the visibility of your own site! Of course this is achieved by you taking part in discussions on other blogs and leaving meaningful comments for others to read! If what you have to say is of any value to people, they will click on your link to see what you have going on at your site! This results in you getting more traffic to your blog and without investing a lot of time!

Offer Interesting Content

Lastly and never to be overlooked, when writing content always strive to produce something that benefits readers! After all if what you offer on your own platform holds no interest for others, why would they even consider returning let alone refer your platform to someone else?

One can never get enough blog traffic, or so it seems, and this task along with writing content, should be a top priority for any good blogger! The discussion above offers 5 suggestions as to how you can incorporate your responsibilities of writing content with getting more traffic to your blog! Since these two tasks are extremely important to any person when blogging, it is only fitting to coordinate them to get the best results!

How to change title tags in blogger

We certainly hope that this SEO tip we’re about to give you can definitely go a long way in getting you more – and more relevant – search engine traffic.

What are title tags?

To put it simply, title tags are the document titles required in all HTML/ XHTML documents. The term “documents” includes your website or blog. Ideally, your title tags will be used to help identify the contents of the pages of your website or blog.

The HTML code that defines the title of your HTML documents follows a certain format. Let’s take my blog –http://techpro365.blogspot.in/– as an example.

<head>

<title>Techpro365 Blog | Blogger tips and tricks | SEO | Widgets | Blogger tutorials </title>

</head>

Where can I see the title tags?

Title tags – or the titles of the pages of your website or blog – can be found in:

1. The title in your browser toolbar.

2. The title for the linked page in search engine search results.

3. The title of the bookmark / favourite when the page is added to bookmarks / favourites

So why are title tags important?

Title tags are essential in SEO because they help search engines determine the relevancy of your Web pages for certain keywords and search phrases.

However, a number of publishing platforms, content management systems, and blogging platforms don’t necessarily optimize your title tags for you. And that’s where this quick SEO tip comes in: to help you– edit your title tags dynamically and get found more easily in Internet users’ search queries.

Change Title Tags in Blogger

Go to the Design tab of your Blogger Dashboard. Then, under the Design tab, go to the Edit HTML tab.

Look for this piece of code in your HTML template:

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

If you can’t find it, just press CTRL + F and paste the code on the search box to find it.

Replace the code with:

<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;’>

<title><data:blog.title/></title>

<b:else/>

<title><data:blog.pageName/>  | <data:blog.title/></title>

</b:if>

Click “Save Template” and you’re done!

Other SEO tips on title tags:

1. Apart from the actual post name and blog name, it might be useful to add relevant keywords to your title tag, too. Of course, this means doing your keyword research in advance.

2. Don’t keyword-spam your title tags, though. Try to limit yourself to 70 characters. Longer titles may be cropped by search engines as the results appear in search.

3. Always check your spellings. A small type error may be all that’s stopping you from achieving great things with your title tags.

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