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to their crawl algorithms and thus the old document became I would not call it absolute but some of the information was outdated.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.

There are a few WordPress plugins on the market that can allow your blog to rank better in Search Engines by improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the latest of these SEO plugins is Copycompass, a plugin developed by South African online marketing, design and development company Talooma.

Copycompas is a WordPress SEO plugin that analyzes your post’s copywrite and then giving you a score of how well your post is written in accordance to best SEO practices.

Using Copycompass is a real breeze, once you have written your post simply click the Analyze Content button and Copycompass will analyze the content, work out a overall SEO score and then give you a detailed breakdown of where you can improve your post.

If you see your SEO score is not very good, you can simply return to editing the post following the guidelines as set out by Copycompass.

To get your hand on this great WordPress SEO Copywriting plugin, simply visit Copycompass and download the plugin for free.

When it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) WordPress comes standard SEO ready, but if you are looking for that extra exposure on search engines, and lets be honest who doesn’t? Here is what I think are 5 of the best SEO plugins for WordPress that can help you get that better page rank.

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Platinum SEO Pack

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Platinum SEO Pack for WordPress is an all in one solution for managing all aspects of SEO on your WordPress blog. This is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress with features such as automatic 301 redirects for any permalink changes, Optimized Post and Page Titles for search engines, helps you avoid duplicate content and add index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noodp, noydir, noarchive, nosnippet meta tags to any post/page.

Download Platinum SEO Pack

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Google XML Sitemaps

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One of the most essential tools in getting your content on search engines is this plugin, lets face it the quicker search engines know about your content and index it the better for you. Google XML Sitemaps generates a sitemap for your site and then pings major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to notify them of new content on your blog.

Download Google XML Sitemaps

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Remind Me

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Remind Me is a SEO plugin for WordPress developed by local blogger Chris M. Remind Me makes deep linking on your site a breeze by showing all relevant links related to the article you are writing and then allows you to easily link to another post with a simple click.

Download Remind Me

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PubSubHubbub

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This plugin has got a weird name, but apart from that it does a wonderful job at notifying the web that you have new content. Everything nowadays strive to be real-time, and PubSubHubbub makes your WordPress blog real-time by announcing to the web that you have new content on your blog, blog aggregators like MyScoop and Afrigator can then now when you have new content and then immediately publish it.

Download PubSubHubbub

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SEO Smart Links

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One of the ways of getting more content on your WordPress blog indexed by search engines is by deep linking to other posts on your blog. Doing this by hand can be tedious so this is where SEO Smart Links comes in. It automatically links keywords and phrases to URLs you would like it to link to.

Download SEO Smart Links

If you have any suggestions to SEO WordPress plugins you use or recommend, feel free to post them in the comments.

SEO? Whats that? That’s the response I normally get when I try to give bloggers a bit of pointers on making their blogs more Search Engine friendly.

The past weekend I gave a presentation to a few bloggers about ways of making money from you blog and one thing that I realised while interacting with them was that their blogs was still using the default WordPress URL structure.

Now there is nothing wrong with this, it works! But when it comes to search engines indexing your blog post, adding a few keywords to your URL can help improve your search engine results page rank.

By default WordPress uses the URL structure www.igeek.co.za/?p=5 now wouldn’t it be nicer if you could have a URL that describes your post? Luckily WordPress allows its users to enable these permalinks very easily.

Enabling Permalink in WordPress

1. Log into your WordPress control panel ( http://yourdomain.co.za/wp-admin/ )
2. Under Settings click on Permalinks
3. Choose your structure, the default structure most blogs us is Day and name, but SEO professionals suggest for better results to use a combination of category and post name. To do this choose Custom Structure and type in the following /%category%/%postname%/
4. Click Save changes and you are good to go

Now you are one step closer to ranking better in search engines.

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.