SEO Advice for Bloggers, Straight from the Horse’s Mouth

At a current WordCamp conference, Matt Cutts, one of Google’s most outspoken authorities, weighed in with some advice for bloggers. Some of what he had to say was real news and some of it just reinforced common SEO wisdom, but it was all very useful information. The video of Matt’s presentation is shown below. If you don’t have an hour to watch the whole thing, I’ve also summarized some of Matt’s more notable points.

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RSS subscribers will need to click on the video link to watch.

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Juicy Tidbits

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Matt had a lot to say. Here are some of his most noteworthy observations.

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• If you think Google hates your site, get over it. Algorithms don’t hold grudges.

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• WordPress is very good for SEO right out of the box.

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• The SEO Title Tag Plugin can be very helpful for your rankings.

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• If you have a choice about how to structure your URLs, use dashes to indicate word breaks. If you use underscores, though, don’t bother making the switch. Just be sure to use one of the two.

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• Put your blog in a sub-directory rather than the root in case you want to do other things with your site later. It might also get people to link to your home page and your blog separately for double the link juice. Just don’t name the directory “wordpress.”

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• Be sure that post creation dates are easy to find.

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• If you want to get listed in Google News, you need to have multiple authors.

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• Full text RSS gets more loyal readers. Partial feeds just get more page views (not sure about this one).

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• When considering video vs. podcast, check your rating on hotornot.com. If you got 6 or lower, go with a podcast.

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• Use a different stylesheet for mobile content.

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• Having a lot of slashes in your URL, such as for the date, doesn’t cause problems in Google. It might still cause problems in Yahoo or MSN.

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• Communicate with Google through the Webmaster Console. It’s a great way to monitor for any potential ranking problems.

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• If you’re popular enough that people might want to hack you, think about making your wp-admin folder only accessible via a white list.

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Common SEO Advice

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Matt also provided a number of good tips that are just common sense when it comes to SEO. For those of you who might be new to SEO, here are the important ones.

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• When writing titles and copy, use words that people might type to search for your post. Don’t forget synonyms and plural versions of those words. Put the same consideration into category names.

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• File extensions make no difference when it comes to search engine rankings. Just make sure to never use .exe.

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• Search engine spiders and visually-impaired users have one thing in common: They both like alt text on images and other media.

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• When you’re moving your domain, use a 301 redirect to preserve your rankings.

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• Don’t put too much work into meta tags. Google doesn’t pay very much attention to them.

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• If you want to be ranked, make sure your site can be crawled.

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• Decide whether or not to use www in your URLs and be consistent about it. The yes-www plugin is great for this. Also be sure to set your preference in the Google Webmaster Console.

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• Query strings are treated the same as static URLs. Just be sure to limit the number of parameters to two or three.

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• Supplemental pages need links to get out of the supplemental index.

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The real take-home lesson from Matt’s presentation, and one that’s echoed time and again by SEO professionals and successful bloggers alike, is to focus on content first and rankings second. If you have one, you will get the other. More importantly, it doesn’t pay to try and game Google’s algorithm.\n

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