White Hat SEO Tips from Matt Cutts of Google

Here are the best free SEO tips from the Google Guy, Matt Cutts. Matt is a Senior Engineer at Google. He works on search quality, keeping the spam off the search engine. He is in charge of sending visitors, hundreds to millions times a day to high quality posts.

Here’s the video of Matt Cutts 2007 SEO Tips at Wordcamp:

If you have no time to watch this more than 1 hour video, you may read below the summary I prepared. These are based only on my own understanding.9 Tips on Keyword Optimization
8 Tips on SEO URLs
6 Tips on Accessibility and Usability
4 Tips on Link Building
Adsense Tip
7 Recommended Tools and Plugins

General SEO Tip: Google or People First?

Get noticed by the world first and then get traffic from Google. If you push your site up into Google first to make people can find you, you are going uphill.

[This blog’s tip: See The top 7 sources of free web site traffic]

9 Tips on Keyword Optimization

The following are the SEO keyword tips revealed by Matt:

1. Google penalizes sites that stuff keywords, not because of promoting immortality device like that of Alex Chiu. Don’t obviously stuff your posts with SEO keywords make it look as natural. There are natural ways to make them appear into your post. Use this knowledge only for good, never for evil.
2. Use the words that users are typing in the search engine boxes in your blog posts. For example, type in lol cats in Google’s free Keyword Tool and it will show you synonyms for lol cats, like cat pictures, L.O.L, funny pics cats, funny pictures cats and LOL kittens.
3. Use also the plural forms, not just singular.
4. Don’t use common keyword misspellings, leave it to your readers in a very natural way. There are people who don’t care about the correct spelling of the words they type.
5. Use categories that are good keywords like gadgets, hacks, how-to weblog, blog. This promotes usability and search engine optimization as well. But, don’t use irrelevant categories as it will not only harm usability but also your Google standing.
6. Google don’t rely as much on meta description tag as they’re not seen by the users. Instead, it gives more weight on categories, sidebars, navigation menus on the side, the whole content of the page.
7. It is advisable to use the keywords somewhere in the post.
8. Do not repeat the same keywords within a line but you may use slight keyword variants or synonyms.
9. Do not alter the content you send to googlebot. It’s cloaking and you will be kicked out of the Google index for a long long time. Write with the users and search engines in mind.

8 Tips on SEO URLs

What Matts said on optimizing URLs:

1. Do not put your blog at the root of your domain. Try putting it on a subdomain or a subdirectory. People will link to your root domain and to your blog. That will be an extra pagerank point and a room for future expansion. But, if you already have in the root, it’s not a big deal. Consider this only if you’re starting a blog.
2. Use dashes to separate keywords in your URLs. Google is considering underscore as a good keyword separator. Dashes and underscores are better than no space at all. Though Google can segment keywords from combined words without space, other search engines cannot like Gigablast, Ask.com, Turbo10, etc.
3. Don’t change URLs of your old posts and do a permanent or 301 redirect, if you’ve already done it with no spaces. But use dashes in your future post URLs.
4. You may use URL extensions such as .php, .asp, .cfm, .htm, .html, etc. except .exe.
5. Dynamic URLs with question marks or hash marks are treated by Google as static URL but keep the number of parameters up to 3 only. Otherwise, it will not be crawled by Googlebot.
6. Google doesn’t really care how much or how detailed your URLs are. Page rank flows completely independent of how many slashes there are.
7. Standardize your URL. Choose one from: with www, without www, with slash, with /index.*. Search engine treat them as different URL and you will not get the full credit if the your backlinks are in different format. Analyze your backlink URLs before you decide.
8. Use your own domain name in your FeedBurner feeds thru FeedBurner MyBrand.It’s free. So if you wanna get rid of FeedBurner you can always just leave it behind. And, changing to your own domain name will have no impact to your old FeedBurner URL.

6 Tips on Accessibility and Usability

Matt’s optimization tips to make your blog or site accessible or usable to most of the users:

1. Use Alt tags on your images as it makes big difference in search engines. Matt said there’s a blind guy at Google, who can’t see image but can read Alt tags (?). Don’t make him angry.
2. You may use a full sentence in Alt tags but don’t overdo it or use irrelevant keywords like cheap-cheap-Viagra-online-mesothelioma-debt-consolidation-mortgage-payment. 7 to 8 words are fine but Matt prefers 3 up to 5 words.
3. Do a podcast or video. Matt shared a valuable tip how to choose between podcast and video. Submit a picture of yourself to hotornot.com. If you got a rating of 7 and above, then do a video. Otherwise, podcast is more appropriate. Don’t just believe on what your mother has been saying to you.
4. Use Wordpress for your blog and you’re guaranteed your site is crawlable. Default Wordpress install is almost optimal in terms of crawlability.
5. Don’t use frame sets or other sorts of weird stuff as it don’t work well on iPhones and other cell phones or mobile phones or GSMs. Many people are now accessing sites on their phones.
6. Show dates of the post because people wanna know when your post was created.

4 Tips on Link Building, Link-bait and PageRank

Matt’s advice on link building, link bait and increasing PageRank:

1. Don’t worry about the supplemental results as there’s not much you can do about it. It’s an exclusive PageRank business.
2. Be creative and get huge amount of backlinks. That’s huge amount of PageRank. Below are the best examples of creative concepts for effective link building and getting huge amount of web site traffic:
   ==> LOLCat Builder
   ==> Lonely Girl Fifteen on video
   ==> Million Pixel Homepage
   ==> Making a Mac versus PC parody
   ==> The Free Hugs Campaign
   ==> Parez Hilton
   ==> Video of people saying the word “Google” really fast for about five minutes
   ==> Dr. David’s picture of bloggers and cartoons of what they want to be
   ==> Counting and comparing the spam emails received

on Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo
==> Live-Blog on Techmeme
==> John Dvorak’s Creative controversy
==> Robert Scoble Mention a-listers
==> Jeremy Schumaker’s poll: George Bush - Great President Or Greatest President Ever?
==> Matt Cutts’ got hacked on 1st of April and he really got hacked

3. Selling links and buying links are against Google guidelines and Google take serious action against it. If you want to sell links make sure that they don’t effect search engines. You can do a link through a url that re-directs and then robot that text out, you can use java script, you can use the no follow tag, that’s fine.
4. The best advice is to make great compelling content and come up with some hook, some social engineering, the gimmick, the angle that’s going to make your stuff go viral.

Adsense Tip

Matt on Adsense:

Use adsense section targeting. Just take the meat of your post and Google ads will be more focused about what you’re actually talking about. That means more clicks and more adsense revenues for you.

7 Recommended Tools and Plugins

Matt recommended the following web tools and plugins:

1. Use Akismet math comments spam protection. This stops a lot of people spamming your blog.
2. Use polls to promote democracy like asking “Which type of pet do you have?”
3. Use SEO title tool from Stephan, which swaps the name of your blog with your post title and other stuff.
4. Use Google Analytics and find out where your web site traffic is coming from. You will know if they are coming from the queries that people are using or from direct links or from people that type in your URL. It’s free.
5. Check your robots.txt as it may be blocking your URL completely. Use robots.txt to disallow search engine bots to crawl particular page or directory in your site.
6. Use 404 handler to redirect any external broken links or backlinks to your homepage or to any of your URL and receive free web site traffic. You may check your broken backlinks thru Google Analytics.
7. Develop for IPhone apps. There are important sites that host IPhone apps or IPhone directories where you can get a lot of web site traffic.

Hope the above summary of free SEO tips helps you implement white hat SEO tips on your blog or site. Sorry, if I’ve misunderstood or I’ve missed important points. Please tell me by commenting on this post.

To see the full transcript of Matt’s White Hat SEO Tips, click here.

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