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 bloggery, 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).
Google recently announced today that its SEO Starter Guide is now available in 40 languages. This covers 98% of the global Internet audience according to the company.
“We hope that webmasters around the world can use the guide to improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing in search engines,” says Brandon Falls of Google’s Search Quality Team.
Google’s SEO Starter Guide, it is a “basic guide” that lists best practices on search engine optimization and SEO marketing according to Google the gude can be used by webmasters and SEO agencies to inproving indexing of their websites.
The SEO Marketing guide was announced back in November, focusing on areas like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, etc.
Here’s the list of the languages it is now available in:
- Arabic
- Bulgarian
- Catalan
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Chinese (Traditional)
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- English (GB)
- Filipino
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese (BR)
- Portuguese (PT)
- Romanian
- Russian
- Serbian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Thai
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
- Vietnamese
You can get the download the SEO Starter Guide here . If you are an internet marketer I recommend you to download the guide and apply the advice to your website – particularly if you are new to the game. It’s a compact guide for basic search engine optimization and SEO Marketing.
Joost de Valk, a wordpress developer and an online marketer did an awesome session on SEO and optimisation strategies for Wordpress Blogs at recent expo in London.
If you have a web business or a blog on wordpress you don’t want to miss this session.
Google has kicked of a series of videos for optimising Adsense . This seems to be an effort to help publishers to get most out of their adsense, while this should have happened much earlier when Google dominated the publishers’ site monthly income. They seem to have realised that publishers are making a better income of their sites without Google adsense, I don’t have Google adsense on my blog, but I make a decent income from adsense on my other websites.
The better publishers make out from the program, the better the program will continue to perform and better the ROI for Google.
This is one of the first videos of the series and it looks at ad sizes, and Google recommends them big. They suggest the following sizes.
- 300 x 250 medium rectangle.
- 728 x 90 leaderboard
- 160 x 600 skyscraper
As per Google Adsense team , these sizes have proven to deliver better results for both publishers and advertisers. Advertisers favour these formats, and if you ve receiving all ad types, you ll find that advertisers will specifically target yuoir sites more often. If you position your ad units well, users will be more likely to see these ad formats and find the ad that they are interested in.
If you have downloaded Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets , you ll be in a better position to capitalize adsense revenues and be a few years ahead in the adsense game. Ad placement is an art rather than a science, if there were a way to just insert ads for maximum clicks, everybody would be doing it, but there isn’t. It take creativity and experimentation to make money from adsense.
I can see why Google would recommend the larger sizes, because they will be more likely to catch the eys, but if they ar eplaced poorly within the sites design, I doubt if the sizes will make much of a difference. It certainly wont make a difference in your adsense revenues.
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Title tag is the most important SEO real estate that you have, just by rewriting the title tag you can easily increase your click thro rate.
The title tag is a piece of code that tells the search engine what your page is all about. It gives a basis for the search spider to assign relevancy to your website, the result is also displyed in the search results as a hyper link, and it’s what the visitors see at the top of their browser while they are on your site.
Write a title tag that the search engines and your user love to see.
Here’s how :
Step 1 : Include a Title Tag Most websites dont have one , even some of the top fortune 500 corporate websites don’t have a title tag. If you leave this blank the search engine will show an “untitled document” in teh search results on top on your page. No one searched for “untitled document” you are missing an opportunity for better SEO and sales for your products.
ie. The title that you ll see on the top of this page uses the following ’Make Money Online with Internet & Affiliate Marketing and Blogging - Web Traffic ROI’ , which is the title tag of the page. Every page on your site should have a title tag based on the content on your page.
Step 2: Avoid using your URL as your Title Tag
Many webmasters have been using URLs of individual pages as their title tags.
A title tag like “WebTrafficROI/categories/product1234.html” has the website address, the category and the product name but does nothing to enhance the search results. Some automated websites automatically generate a title tag for you which is similar to the above mentioned url. If it does, find out how you can change the setting to have better control of your title tag.
Step 3: Say goodbye to friendly greetings and focus on your keywords
There’s nothing wrong with a friendly greeting in person. But your title tag is the wrong place to say hello to your audience. A friendly greeting like “Welcome to my web page!” doesn’t tell the search engine what the page is all about. And again, who searches for welcome messages?
Step 4: Arrange your top two keyword phrases so they make sense
The best title tags use a combination of words and phrases that all get searched regularly. Then arrange them in a way so they make sense. On this blog for example , I use a combination of words and phrases that all get searched regularly — Internet marketing , affiliate marketing , make money online, blogging ,web traffic.
But I’ve arranged them to make sense as well as pull traffic from several different keyword searches:
“Make Money Online with Internet & Affiliate Marketing and Blogging – Web Traffic ROI”
If you were looking for advice on How to make money with your blogs or with internet marketing, you’d know you were in the right place after seeing that title.
Your title tag is easy to find and easy to change in your HTML code. On most web pages, your title tag (and meta tags) are right at the top, below your “head” tag:
<head>
<title>Make Money Online with Internet & Affiliate Marketing and Blogging – Web Traffic ROI</title>
When writing your title tag, keep it under 70 characters. Put your best keywords at or near the beginning of your title tag. With the limited number of characters you’re permitted, your keywords at the end of the tag could get cut off and visitors won’t see them.
If you have an ecommerce site , including your customer service or toll free number in your Title Tag can increase your conversions.
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