When you start a blog, you always hope that people will read it. But how will they know it’s there? How will they find your ultra-cool, well-designed blog?

If you are lucky or have done everything right, they will find your blog near the top of search engine results for your topic.

How do you get that to happen? How do you get your blog to rank well in search engine results?

Jon Leger has made quite a name for himself as an expert on raising the search engine ranking (in the search results) of blogs and other sites by various clever means. Now he’s about to release a report that he says debunks many popular myths about what makes your blog or website rank well in Google searches.

He is offering one chapter of the report for free. I suggest that you download a copy and read it. It’s only a few pages. If you do, please let me know what you think.

Personally I don’t think what he says accounts for my Art Fun Cheap blog achieving a PageRank 4 only 7 weeks after I started it. I didn’t advertise it. I did not buy or trade links. I did not put articles linking back to it in article directories. I didn’t do much of anything to promote it except register it with BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog, and Technorati.

Almost all my traffic comes from Google searches. Lately I’m getting some from Yahoo, too. That tells me I found a topic people are interested in, that has little competition, and got the keywords right. Because there are still not very many links to the site. Yet people from all over the world have found it through search engines.

So as much as I respect Jon (a lot!), I can’t totally buy into his explanation for why sometimes lower PageRank sites outrank higher-PageRanked sites in search results. He says PageRank comes strictly from links. I say that may be mostly true, but my example shows that it can’t be the whole story.

It appears to me that if you build a site on a topic that people are actually searching for in search engines, and there is very little competition (sites with quality information), Google will consider your site an authority site by default—and give it PageRank.

For the same reason, therefore, Google will also rank it highly in search results. So, if your site had a low PageRank but great information that matched the search string, wouldn’t you rank highly in the search results? That seems to be my experience. My site was being found in Google searches from the start—when it had a PageRank of 0.

Think about it. Imagine, for example, that suddenly the world gets interested in a remote tropical island called Isla Coqui (maybe Johnny Depp buys it and the Dalai Lama goes to visit?).

If you had a 12-page, original-content site called IslaCoqui.com (and hardly any other site even mentioned Isla Coqui), don’t you think that Google would consider IslaCoqui.com an authority site? Apparently Google would.

Even if the number of visitors interested in that topic was small, your site would be an authority and could acquire PageRank and also rank well in Google searches.

Anyway, that’s the way it looks to me. What do you think? Read the free report pages and post a comment here, OK?

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To set your blog or website apart from the mass-produced herd, you need a custom logo, great graphics, maybe a custom background, too.

But who can afford that for every site, especially if you have a lot of niche blogs to build? Well, now we all can, at a new website called Quick Web Creations!

These logos and graphics are nifty, too. Here’s the first logo I made. It took just a couple of minutes.

This site makes it easy to create Web 2.0 style letters and graphics, with reflections, shiny, glossy effects, and other trendy looks that would be a major pain to create in Photoshop. People will be impressed. Here’s another logo I found there.

It’s a lot easier than you would think.

For one thing, there are thousands of logos you can copy and change the words. For another, there are easy controls.

There’s also a short instructional video. It’s fun and easy to learn.

Need logos? Join the coolest automated logo-design and graphics service where you just pick your colors and fonts and type in whatever you want to. Anytime. As many as you need. Change them whenever you want to.

How about a custom background? You can easily and quickly created it yourself with this new service. You don’t have to own or know how to use Photoshop or any other graphics program.

You pay only $6.97 to join for life, and you can make as many gorgeous logos and graphics as you want to—whenever you want them.

Pay just once. Cheap, easy. Stunning graphics and logos. Change them whenever. That’s my kind of graphics plan. And as we say in Texas, it’s too cheap to be without. Why not take a look and see if it works for you?

HOLIDAY HINT: A membership to this site could also be a useful, fun, and inexpensive gift for children and adults.

This is advance notice of a great new audio ad system that will go online February 1. The time to sign up is now. Because you also get paid for everyone who signs up through you!

Pay Per Play Net Audio pays you to put a snippet of javascript on a page of your blog (or website). A 5-second audio ad then plays whenever that page is displayed. And you get paid every time it does!

The ads are context-sensitive, so they match the content of the page. You can put them on as many pages as you want to (one per page). And you get paid for every visitor who views a page.

We are assured that the company has signed up the top broadcast advertisers, plus companies like Harley-Davidson. But your site is eligible no matter how small or how little traffic you get.

They promise that the ads will not violate the Google Adsense terms of service. They swear to have one of the top search engines as a partner, but they won’t announce which one till February 1. I think we can guess which one it is, though.

As much as I hate the idea of automatic audio commercials—even if they are only 5 seconds long—I have signed up. This is an easy way to monetize blogs and websites without compromising the design. This is going to be huge!

So go right now to the PayPerPlay site, try out the demo, and sign up. Then tell get your friends to sign up through you. Make your blog pay its own way!