I happened to come across this video today while stumbling through some SEO topics. This is a 45 minute talk Matt Cutts of Google gave during the San Francisco Wordcamp 2009 conference. It is of interest to Wordpress website owners who are looking to improve their search engine results.
Google On Wordpress
Notes From Google On Wordpress Presentation
For those who don't have the time to go through the entire 45 minute video, here are some notes I took.
Why do you blog?
Common reasons why people use Wordpress to blog:
Fame
Access
Attention
Money
Rankings
How To Do Better In Google
Wordpress is a good choice. Wordpress takes care of 80-90% of SEO. Evidence of this is that Matt Cutts is a Wordpress website owner and uses only the following plugins:
akismet
cookies for comments
wp super cache
enforce www
feedburner
The Importance of PageRank
Google crawls in order of page rank.
The higher page rank:
the more attention
the more deeper
the faster you will be found
the more frequenct a website will get crawled
What is page rank?
The number of people that link to you and how important those links are.
Its not about getting a lot of links. Its also about the importance of those links.
You get page rank from sites pointing to you
You pass page rank to the sites you link to
How does Google ranks pages
It ranks according to relevance and reputation.
How to be relevant and reputable:
Write about what you love
Write about what you are really good at
Write about what you care about
Write often. Write everyday.
Keywords Keep You Relevant
Think about all the ways you can describe something
Write about it naturally
Use google keyword tool to help
Think about niches and keywords you are targeting
Keywords in your website structure
In Wordpress, use as your custom permalnik structure /%postname%/
Use keywords in title and url
Use dashes, underscore next if you need to, spaces are the worst
Modify the permalink to be different than the url to gain more keyword spreading
Use categories that are good keywords
How to build reputation (links)
Be interesting
Update often
Start small in a small niche and then build up
Provide a useful service
Do original research or reporting
Give great information
Find a creative niche
Write some code/open source
Live blogging
Make lists
Create controversy
Meet folks on social networks
Video and podcasts
Google tools to use
Google webmaster console
Google analytics
Look at your popular posts, update them or create new ones off same topic
Look at bounces and try to reduce them
Feedburner
Google website optimizer
Google custom search
Use these two tags to mark out the meat of your content if you adsense
