About two years ago Google released the first official Google SEO Starter Guide, a very useful search engine optimization guide that directs you in making your webpage more search engine friendly.

The problem with the old Google SEO Started Guide is that it was old, since it’s release in 2008, Google has made numerous changes to their crawl algorithms and thus the old document became I would not call it absolute but some of the information was outdated.

Just a few days ago Google released a brand new Google SEO Starter Guide. The new SEO Starter Guide contains, among other things, SEO basics, tips for improving the overall structure of your site, suggestions to optimize content, insights to help you optimize your site for mobile devices, and tips to help you promote your site.

The best new addition must be the help to optimize your site for mobile devices seeing as mobile web is slowly starting to take over, specially in continents like Africa where the majority of Internet users make use of their mobile phones to browse the web.

Download your free copy of Google SEO Starter Guide here.

Today I started thinking about how I could encourage more people to leave comments on my blog and in turn give something back, and came up with the brilliant plan of removing nofollow from the comments links.

NoFollow is a relationship property that gets set by the blogging software on all links that is contained with in comments, if a search engine finds a nofollow relationship it simply ignores the link and thus not give links back to the sites of the people commenting. Backlinks are a great way to improve your search engine rankings but its always difficult to get your links out there on other sites.

I am for sure no SEO guru but I know the basics and enough to realise how much a backlink is worth, thus have I came up with this plan. Every time someone now comments on my posts and fill in their website URL I will remove the nofollow from the link and ensure a backlink to their site. This hopefully would encourage people to leave more comments and get something back for partaking in my site.

I believe if you give you shall receive. I wrote a small WordPress plugin to disable nofollow links on your comments, please note that it only removes the comments from the author website link, nofollow is still added to links inside the comment. Download my plugin called DoFollow here. Just upload to your plugins directory and activate.

Remember to leave a comment to get your backlink.