We received hundreds of entries for our free website competition that ended on Friday 7 September 2012. Entries came in from all corners of South Africa as business owners scrambled to enter the competition. After the resounding success of this competition we are currently debating whether to give away a free website every month. Email us if you think this is a good idea.

We are in the process of getting in contact with all the winners of our free website competition, you can see the winning email addresses below.

Congratulations!

1. rodger@reachadvertising.co.za
2. clix@africanpix.co.za
3. kagiso@ironeye.co.za
4. info@mvemvaneengineering.co.za
5. sales@dreamline.co.za
6. info@fstopphotography.co.za
7. arnaud@jabulanijewellery.co.za
8. kerry@justbookkeeping.co.za
9. vaughn@bdprojects.co.za
10. billy.radebe@vodamail.co.za

Interesting research by YP, a US based publisher and ad network and brought to my attention by Search Engine Land in their post. Local search data was analysed across desktop and mobile devices and the results are interesting with Restaurants the most popular local search term.

You can read the full post at Search Engine Land here.

“Are You Aware of the Major Change with Your Local Business Listing Page with Google?”

Google recently integrated Google Places with Google+, creating the new home for your local business listing pages called Google+ Local.

There are several crucial things you should know about this change to ensure your business gains enough exposure to generate new leads, customers, and sales to your business...

You Will Learn:

• What is Google+ Local and How it Impacts Your Business
• Key Features of Google+ Local that will Help Your Business
• The New Business Scoring System that Replaced Google Place’s 5-Star Review System
• How These Changes Impact Your Customers and Prospects
• How to get your business on Google Local with and without a website

Blog SEO is put on a pedestal by many bloggers. It is shrouded in mystery and considered to be the domain of web experts and their ilk. It does not have to be so. I believe that every single blogger can increase there blog seo by making a few changes to there blogs and implementing a few seo techniques.

There are many scripts available for bloggers, some paid and some open source. I will focus on WordPress in this article because I believe it to be the most secure and robust platform available to blog owners and is our script of choice at SEM Zoom. Joomla is a good alternative to WordPress but does not have as strong a user base. Many of the plugins and techniques described for blog seo will be relevant to other blogging systems and plugins that offer the same functionality should be easily found.

1. Blog SEO = Blog speed

The speed of your website has become an imprortant ranking factor and counts towards your blog search engine optimisation. There are a few methods of decreasing the loading time on your blog and Google is as helpful as ever. If you have not already added your blog to the Google Webmasters site, do so now. The Google Webmasters are gives you access to Google ranking data, crawl statistics and site performance tips to increase your blog seo. WordPress has a wide choice of plugins that can increase your page performance.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache remains is the most popular WordPress caching plugin with over 2.6 million downloads to date. It offers a variety of functionality for decreasing your page loading time. Its core functionality of caching database queries decreases your loading time and increases your page speed. It also helps in if you have a sudden influx of visitors for a popular page and will cache the necessary pages so that the visitors and Google do not see any lag.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare provides a content distribution network for your website to fall back onto when under pressure by traffic. This is a free service from Cloudflare with premium options available. This will decrease your loading time and make sure your blog speed is always at an optimum.

WP Smush.it

The WP Smush.it plugin uses the Smush.it API to decrease the size of your images on your website. This decreases your websites bandwidth footprint and in turn decreases your page load time, perfect for blog seo.

2. More Links = Blog SEO

One of the key ranking factors that Google uses to evaluate your blog’s credibility is backlinks. There are many ways to get more backlinks to your website. Forum posts, blog comments and social profiles are a few common sources of backlinks that have been used by savvy blog seo marketers in the past.

Many bloggers do not realize that the internal links on your blog also affect your blog seo and these can be harnessed in many ways to your advantage. WordPress has a few plugins that can be to increase both your offsite seo and your on site seo and get you steaming into 2012.

Digg Digg / Slick Social Share Buttons

Digg Digg and Slick Social Share Buttons offer largely the same functionality and you could choose between either. I’m using Slick Social Share Buttons on Seo Report Shop at the moment and you can see them on the left hand side.. The main reason was that I had some conflict with Digg Digg causing it not to work as intended. The plugins allow you to add social sharing buttons that float along side your content. I believe that these make them more visible to visitors to your blog and will result in more shares and more backlinks from your visitor social profiles.

WP-PageNavi

WP-PageNavi does one of the simplest jobs on this list but is just as effective as the rest of the plugins in helping increase your blog seo. It replaces the Next Page-Previous Page links at the bottom of your posts with the real titles of the posts.

SEO Smart Links / Automatic SEO links

Internal linking is an important factor in on site blog seo and both plugins give you a massive edge. You can select words or phrases on your blog that when found will automatically be converted to links to a particular page. This increase the link juice credibility for those pages. The increase does not have as big an effect as a link on another blog, but every bit counts towards your blog seo.

SEO Search Terms Tagging 2

This plugin takes advantage of the incoming searches to your blog and the keywords being used. It then places those keywords beneath your post increasing the  keyword density of those terms on your page and helping you increase your blog seo. You can choose whether to have the terms linked or not or to place them in a widget on the sidebar. I have had great results using this plugin in the past and it remains one of the first plugins I install on new blogs.

RSS Footer

RSS Footer adds any links of your choice to the end or the beginning of your RSS feed. This allows every service that indexes your RSS feed to give you a free link back to your blog. It’s an easy way to increase your blog seo and gain traffic from RSS indexes.

3. Blog SEO = Total Control

You will never improve your blog seo without taking control of it. There are tools available that can help and guide you into making the right choices for your blog’s seo. The tools give you different advantages and together provides you with an all round tool set to increase your blog’s seo ranking. They range from the all-encompassing WordPress Seo by Yoast to a plugin that makes sure your visitors and Google always end up on a real page and not a 404 error page.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast is the defacto standard for any blog looking to increase their blog seo. It encompasses a broad spectrum of tools and utilities that blows away the opposition in my honest opinion. The plugin handles the sitemap generation and search engine pinging services that you’ll need to use to let the search engines know that you have new content. It also the meta content and title tags for every single page on your blog in an easy to use interface. The page analysis tool bundles with the plugin evaluates your blog seo as you type a post and gives you tips as you go along on improving it.

SEO Slugs

SEO slugs removes the common words from your links so that your keywords have prime place in your url. It automatically removes words like ‘at’,'and’ and ‘in’ from the url. You can also change the url to suit you so you are always in control of the final url.

SEO Rank Reporter

SEO rank reporter tracks your selected keywords and how they have changed over time. It’s the kind of tool that most serious seo specialist would have in their toolbox and its available for free on the WordPress site to help you track your blog seo and see how they changes you have made affect your ranking.

SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images makes sure that every single image that you add to your blog has an appropriate ALT and TITLE tag. These are invaluable for your blog seo as well as your on page seo. Additionally, these help drive more traffic to your page by getting your images indexed in the Google Images search index.

Redirection

Google does not like 404 pages and neither do your visitors. The Redirection plugin makes sure that your visitors don’t end up on a 404 page and either sends them to the home page or the closest possible match to the page they were searching for. The plugin uses 301 redirects to make sure that you are not affected negatively in your blog seo because of broken links. In addition to the primary function of redirecting broken links, the Redirection plugin also shows what uses were looking for before being redirected. This should be a good indication of new topics to discuss on your blog.

Missing SEO data

The Missing SEO data plugin provides a simple dashboard to see which pages and posts on your blog have missing seo data which is negatively impacting there seo. As your blog increases in size, its important to stay on top of things and this plugin makes sure that you don’t miss a single page.