Matt Cutts of Google – 12 SEO Tips from WordCamp
There may be no better speaker to listen to about Web page optimization than Matt Cutts, who’s been working for Google for nine years. Matt’s message at WordCamp SF — the WordPress conference — was “hey guys, here’s what our spiders are looking for.” Here are some of his tips. While several of them are specific to WordPress and blogging, others are relevant for any Web page.
1. Think about ways to naturally include in a post or page the different ways something can be described. For example, if you are selling a small storage device, include, “thumb drive”, “USB drive” and “flash drive” in your page or post.
2. Use minor word variants between your Title and WordPress URL slug. A popular post of Matt’s has the word “changing” in the Title and the URL slug uses the word “change”.
3. Select WordPress Categories that are good keywords
4. In your WordPress Permalink settings, select Custom Structure and add %postname%. Do not use the default “?p=123″. (We actually have been recommending using/%category%/%postname%/)
5. Speak in plain English on your home page.
6. While inbound links are good, particularly from high PageRank sites, do not suffer from “BO” (backlink obsession). Focus more on new content.
7. Talk about something you care about in your blog posts.
8. Look at Google Analytics “Top Landing Pages” to find out your best evergreen content.
9. Apply the “Katamari philosophy”. Don’t over reach too soon — build your way up to more diverse content.
10. Provide a useful service.
11. Do some live blogging.
12. Post lists like this one. Apparently, people love lists.
According to Matt, a video of his presentation will be coming soon. We’ll post this when it’s available.
No Related Posts
Steve Chipman is the founder and president of Lexnet Consulting Group, based in San Francisco. Lexnet is a leading value added reseller for CRM (customer relationship management) solutions.
with RSS Reader
This is probably a really, really stupid question, but…what is “live blogging?” Sorry, had to ask, as its not a phrase I’ve heard before. :/
P.S. Your #2 links to Matt’s blog, but I don’t think it links to the post you meant to.
Good question – at WordCamp, there were people in the audience writing a blog post about what Matt Cutts was saying, as he was saying it. That’s live blogging.
I’ll check the link that you referenced. Thanks.