According to Matt Cutts – Head of Google’s Webspam Team, if you want your blog to rank well on Google’s search engine you must use Wordpress. Matt recently mentioned at WordCamp SF that Wordpress takes care of about 80 – 90 percent of SEO mechanics.
He gave a SEO presentation that spans 50 pages and also gives tips on how to rank high on Google.
The two biggest ones are be relevant and be reputable.
Being Relevant
Google is all about relevancy, high the relevancy better the impact of your blog on search engines. According to Matt If you have a blog you need to answer basis about
Who am I ?
Why am I here ?
What do I love ?
What am I really good at doing ?
What do I have to say?
Once you’ve answered those questions and commit to exploring them via blogging, there are some technical things for gaining relevance, like keyword relevance. Choose words users are likely to type, and include them naturally in blog posts. For example, a blogger can use name variations referring to the same device: usb drive, thumb drive, flash drive, pen drive. Matt recommends ALT attributes.
Wordpress URL structure is considered as a high ranking factor in Google rank algo. WordPress default URL structure uses question marks and numbers, instead of day and name, month name, etc.. Cutts says these types of URLs improve aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility. For URL paths with keywords in them, Cutts says dashes (hyphens) are preferred over underscores to separate words, but no spaces between words is a bad idea (example.com/my-keywords).
Don’t overdo keywords in the text. Make sure they flow naturally. Otherwise, Google could bust you for keyword stuffing.
Being Reputable
Cutts recommends the following to boost a blogger’s reputation:
– Be interesting
– Update often
– Find your niche
– Provide a useful service
– Do original research or reporting
– Give great information
– Live blog
– Make lists
– Create controversy
– Meet people on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed
Other Useful Information
Google crawls in decreasing order of PageRank, which means if a site has a low PageRank, it will be crawled last, behind sites with higher ranking.
Cutts’ simplified definition of PageRank is “the number and importance of links pointing to a site.”
Cutts also recommends plug-ins he uses for his blog, which include Akismet (a comment spam catcher), Cookies for Comments (another comment spam catcher), Enforce www. Preference (301 redirects to no-www or yes-www preference for link building), Feedburner Feedsmith (for tracking subscribers), and WP Super Cache (for fast caching).
Download the Search Marketing presentation from Matt Cutts blog
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