How To Make Customized Header Graphic For Blogs : Make A Logo

Build your brand and get more search engine traffic by creating your own, unique, custom logo for your blog.  These easy steps will work on any blogging platform, including Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, etc.  Optimized images are often identified, indexed, and included in search engine results pages (SERPS) more quickly than even your best written content.

It is important to have a nice looking logo on your blog as it displays your identity and presents a great first impression to your visitors and prospective clients, as they have nothing else by which to judge you.  This contributes to building your brand, as well as adding a professional look and feel to your website.

I've been busy doing some photo editing, as you can see.  What do you think of these new logos that I created?  The first one is a header graphic and the other ones are clickable banner images that are optimized for search engines.  Creating an optimized banner or logo image for your blog will improve SEO, Google page rank, and more. 


Simple Steps to Make A Header Graphic or Logo for Your Blog: 

1. First, choose an image or several images that you want to include as a background for your blog logo.
2. Save the image (that you chose as your background image) to your hard drive or USB drive.
3. Open Microsoft Office Excel program.  If you do not have Excel, then you may use OpenOffice.
4. To begin creating your header graphic / logo, go up and click "Insert," then come down to "Picture," and click "From File."
5. Choose the  image that you want to insert.  This will be the background for your logo.
6. Once you insert the image, you will see that you can resize it, making it larger or smaller to your liking by clicking and dragging the edges of the photo, altering the height and width.
7. To add text, double-click on an open cell.  At the top of the toolbar, choose your desired font face and font size.  Then begin typing your text, which should be the title of your blog or website.  You may also want to add a slogan, but this is not absolutely necessary.
8. Copy and paste this text on top of your image.  Go up to the upper left corner of your screen, grab this text that you just created by placing your mouse on it, and then drag it onto your image, placing it where you want it to go.  If you want to resize the text, you may easily do this by dragging the edges just like you did in step 6. with your image.
9. Highlight the image by clicking around the entire outside of the entire logo, this includes the image and the text that you added.
10. Right-click, then come down and click "Copy" to copy your image to the clipboard.
11. Open Microsoft Paint program.  Go up to "Edit" and click "Paste."  You should see your image in Microsoft Paint now.  Do not be alarmed if you also see extra cells from Microsoft Excel on your image.  We will get rid of those later. 
12. Go up to "File," click "Save As...," choose the location where you want to save your file, and give it a name.  Now it is saved.  Remember where you saved it.  You will need to retrieve your file in the next step.  You may also, now exit out of Paint and Excel.
13. Open Microsoft Office Picture Manager.  Open your image file that you saved in step 12. from the location where you saved it.  
14. Click "Edit Pictures," and then click "Crop."  Crop the image to your liking, making sure to remove any extra cells that may display around the perimeter of your image and may have been copied from Excel. 
15. Now click save.  This provides you with a new, bitmap image with a .bmp extension.  I always like to save my images in .jpg or .png format also.  This is best because it creates a much smaller file size and will take a lot less time for your blog or website to load once you upload it to your site.
16. To export or save your image in (JPEG - File Interchange Format) .jpg or (PNG - Portable Network Graphics Format) .png format, just go up to "File" and then click "Export" in Microsoft Office Picture Manager. Go over to the right side where it says, "Export with this file format," choose "JPEG," and click "OK."  This saves your image in .jpg format.
17. You are now prepared to upload your blog header graphic to your blog.

I will teach you how to create a clickable banner image in a future post, so make sure to subscribe to Google Image Blog and stay in the loop.

I Will Create A Custom Graphic Just for You!

Contact me and I will create a custom logo or clickable banner for your blog or website.  My fees are very cheap, but my professionalism and the quality is great.  Contact me for inquiries at at1970alexander (at) gmail (dot) com.  I will make your graphic to your specifications today!  I will also optimize your images with alternative text, title, and dimension information, which is essential to indexing by search engines like Yahoo, Google, Excite, etc.

Examples:

Below, you will find some samples of logos that I have created.  Of course, I resized them to a smaller size just for the purposes of this article.  The first one is for this blog.

Just for fun, hover over the images for a second or two prior to clicking them and see how I optimized them with alternative text, title tags, etc.

The next header logo is for Freelance Jobs Daily Update, where you can get all kinds of contract, short-term, and long-term jobs in all fields.  

This one is for Nene Leaks It, where you can post anonymous secrets or pet peeves.

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