Creating search engine friendly websites is something
that escapes many designers and developers. A
website should not only be alluring to human visitors
but if showing up for keyword phrases in the search
engines is also important, then a site needs to
be tempting to search engine bots as well.
In this show, Matt
Cutts, Google’s celebrity engineer, will
talk about what Google’s bots look for in
a Google friendly website.
Interview
Recorded:October 20, 2006
Segment 1; Segment
2; Segment
3; Segment 4
We
invite your comments, questions, feedback and
suggestions
SEO 101: The Basics of Creating
Search Engine Friendly Websites |
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The basics of creating a search engine friendly
website have not changed much over the years.
In fact, Google has even published webmaster guidelines
outlining some of the things you should and should
not do. Find out if you are working within the
guidelines and covering the basic bases. |
Does Google Consider SEO a
Bad Thing? |
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Google’s love / hate relationship with
SEO has evolved over time. In the beginning, SEO
was full of trickery and deceit but over the years
Google’s algorithm has been upgraded to
filter out the deceptive techniques and "white
hat" SEO means working with the search engines
to provide quality search results. |
Discover Ways to Increase
Traffic to Your Website |
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In this episode, Matt talk about some of the
many ways to increase traffic to your website
organically since that is what the Google algorithm
prefers. |
The Future of Search Marketing
& Google |
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Still a relatively new industry, search marketing’s
future is just around the corner. With search
engines replacing the yellow pages and encyclopedia’s,
and Web 2.0 providing more ways to reach consumers,
Matt will share his thoughts on the future of
search marketing. |
Google's mission is to organize the world's information
and make it universally accessible and useful.
What is a "Google"?
"Googol" is the mathematical term for
a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined
by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician
Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book,
"Mathematics and the Imagination" by
Kasner and James Newman. Google's play on the
term reflects the company's mission to organize
the immense amount of information available on
the web.
Matt Cutts Interview Summary
Chatting with eMarketing Talk Show hosts Brooke
Schumacher, Cindy Turrietta and Todd Sarouhan,
Matt Cutts, Google’s Software Engineer talks
about search engine friendly websites and how
to create a site that Google bots will look for.
Officially or unofficially, Matt Cutts is now
recognized as a spokesman for Google. Armed with
a PhD in Computer Graphics from the University
of North Carolina, Cutts joined Google in 2000
and today, is one of the most recognized faces
of the company. Chatting with Brooke, Cindy and
Todd, Mark talks about creating search engine
friendly websites and how to increase you web
traffic organically.
When discussing the qualities of a good website,
Cutts agrees that the webmaster guidelines that
Google published on design, content and technical
quality haven’t changed much over the years.
The philosophy behind these guidelines, he says,
was so that people can read it and get an idea
of the kind of sites to make, and not to have
to go into the tiny nitty gritty details. “One
of the main things you need to do, i.e. the stage
one of any website is “making sure that
it is crawlable. You’d be surprised how
many sites, even big sites mess this up.”
He advises webmasters to go through their site
with a fine toothcomb and make sure one can actually
reach the site by clicking around on links. In
stage two of having a good site, Matt feels that
it is important to try and build a reputation,
because then links just come as a “natural
consequence” of this.
According to Cutts, links have become more and
more important over the last few years. Before
Google search engines used to judge pages by exactly
what was on the page. “Now it makes a big
difference if you have the rest of the world telling
the search engine if the site is important or
not, and links are a great way to do this.”
Cutts says. Google now like most other search
engines use links to a large degree, to determine
how reputable a page or a site really is.
So then do broken links and pages in the supplemental
index effect the overall ranking of a site? According
to Matt the answer is no. “What you ideally
want to have is a lot of people linking to you.”
According to Cutts, “while many sites do
have broken links, what Google does is accounts
for all the ways that real web content is out
on the web.”
When asked about making dynamic websites search
engine friendly, Matt feels that while it’s
fine to use all the “dynamic and flashy
stuff,” it’s also helpful especially
for blind users or users with accessibility problems
to have just static links. One recommendation
he offers is to have a navigation bar that are
links into the important parts of your site. This,
he says, can often help search engines find those
pages and guide the bots towards those important
areas.
As a general rule regarding how many parameters
you can have in your URL, Matt feels “it’s
safe to go up to one or two,” while his
advice for new sites to stay out of the ‘sandbox’
is to “develop compelling content.”
According to Matt, Google does not consider SEO
a bad thing. Rather, he says, Google encourages
white hat SEO techniques as the company wants
“a fair and leveled playing field.”
His advice on spam is to report it through our
webmaster console as these spam reports are given
more weight and investigated into.
To increase you web traffic organically, Matt
says to try and find some hook or angle that gives
people a reason to talk about, or link to your
site. “It can be as simple as a newsletter
or running interviews with people.” By getting
people to link to you naturally, you can increase
your sites ranking easily and with no problem
at all. For Matt sites like Yahoo Answers, MySpace.com,
TailRank.com, del.icio.us, and Reddit.com, are
all powerful ways to help increase traffic to
your site regardless of search engines.
On the future of search marketing Matt feels
Google is now doing a much better job of indexing
flash websites. As search engines are getting
better and better, flash websites in the future
will have a much better chance of showing up in
search engine results. Mobile searches and video
searches will also play a big role in the future
as more and more people are becoming tech savvy.
For more on creating search engine friendly
websites visit Matt's
blog.
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