WordCamp 2007 was a two-day conference held recently in San Francisco for WordPress users and developers. Perhaps the most popular and eagerly-anticipated item on the schedule happened the first day of the conference at 5 PM, when Matt Cutts gave a talk on white hat SEO tips for bloggers. Keep reading to see what he had to say.
If you’ve been doing SEO for any length of time, Matt Cutts needs no introduction. He’s the closest thing the industry has to a rock star. Working as part of the spam team at Google, his panels and talks attract huge audiences at conferences, and he writes one of the most widely read blogs covering Google, SEO, and other cool topics. A number of bloggers covered his talk; at least one blogged it live.
Why would a talk given by a search engine expert be of such interest to bloggers? Blogging isn’t just a labor of love anymore; many people are actually making money from their blogs. And like other online businesses, much of their traffic comes in from Google. In anticipation of the talk, blogger Patrick Havens noted that “You aren’t supposed to rely on a single source for incoming [visitors], but I know from practice over the last couple years, that Google brings in almost 50% of my traffic to sites at times. So whatever can be learned will be important.”
Unfortunately, I couldn’t make the talk myself. San Francisco is a little far to travel from South Florida. To all accounts, Cutts is a very entertaining speaker, and his presentation was wickedly funny in addition to being packed full of information.
Much of the information was common sense. For instance, set your blog up so you’re prepared for change; call your blog directory “blog” and not “wordpress” so you can change. Don’t put your blog at the root of your domain, because if you want something besides a blog it will be harder to change – besides, when visitors link to your blog, they’ll often link to the main page of your site and the main blog page, so this way you get a little extra link love. Some of the items were less obvious; others were somewhat obvious, but only if you do SEO for a living.
Google Optimization 
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