Google Publishes a Best Practice SEO Guide

Written on 13th November 2008                                                                                                              10 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.

In a slightly surprising move, Google has launched via its webmaster central blog a best practice guide for search engine optimization.  Why surprising you may ask? Well, Google is notorious for being pretty quiet on this front leaving it to SEO’s, designers, and developers to figure out what works best.

This being so, professional SEO’s needn’t be too concerned as it very much a basic guide and more useful to small business owners looking for ‘just the basics’. I quote…

“Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types.”

All hail the mighty Google.

google, seo, SEO tips

10 Comments »

Free WordPress Plugin: “100 SEO tips”

Written on 19th February 2008                                                                                                              34 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

We Love WordPress

Last week I was browsing through our WordPress Admin here and noticed the “Hello Dolly” plugin. This is a plugin that comes pre-installed with every WordPress install. When activated you will randomly see a lyric from Hello, Dolly in the upper right of your admin screen on every page. As you can imagine this isn’t a very useful plugin. Then I decided to take the “Hello Dolly” plugin and make it do something useful: display tips.

I wrote a blog post on my personal blog and sent an update to Twitter asking for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips. Then I opened up a Google Spreadsheet where people could insert and edit the tips. Within 30 minutes I had received hundreds of tips from several friendly SEO experts (complete list below). Together we wrote, collected and fine-tuned more than 250 tips. We ended up with a nice collection of exactly “100 SEO Tips” which is also the title of the Plugin we launch today.

Even if you know a lot about SEO this plugin is still fun to install. It reminds you, casually, of what you already know but sometimes forget. So, install it, share it, link back here and if you have a few tips of your own please do share them with us so we can include them in the next version of the plugin.

Download: http://thenextweb.org/100-seo-tips.zip
Install: Download the plugin, unzip, upload to server in directory /wp-content/plugins/ and then activate in Wordpress Management. Tips will appear in top right corner of WordPress admin.

Please let us know if you installed it by leaving a comment here with your blog url! Or even better, blog about it and and send us a trackback.

Special thanks to the following people who helped collect the tips: David Petherick, Joop Dorresteijn, Nikki Pilkington , Joery Bruijntjes, Gerben Bouwhuis and Eduard Blacquière .

Hello Dolly, Matt mullenweg, plugin, SEO tips, wordpress

34 Comments »