Matt Cutts Gives Talk on White Hat SEO - Adding SEO Power to Your Blog
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Many of the other items that Matt Cutts talked about will be familiar to SEOs. When you put together a blog entry, for example, think about what keywords web surfers might type into the search engines to find your content. One example he gave was “lol kittens,” which one person used as a tag for some of their Flickr photos. You want to slip the keywords into your posts as naturally as you can; synonyms are your friends. Use keywords not only in your tags and your content, but also in your category names. Oh, and for your posts, swap the title and the blog name.
This is great advice for someone who is just starting to set up a blog. But what should you do if you already have one that you’ve been building up for a while? Matt advises you to not completely mess up your URLs just to change things. Leave the old entries as they are, and make things better going forward.
If you have images in your blog – and let’s face it, some of us really love to post pictures – use ALT tags. Search engine indexing bots can’t “see” images. Limit yourself to no more than three or four relevant words. Adding ALT tags will also make your site easier to crawl, which is very important to getting listed.
You shouldn’t forget your human visitors, of course. Some of them may be coming in on a mobile phone, especially since Apple’s iPhone has a screen that is large enough for mobile browsing. Cutts said that you should use a different style sheet for mobile visitors, not a different site. Such style sheets are not particularly difficult to construct; they were covered in a book I reviewed on Dev Articles several months ago.
Matt also went a little bit into the attitude with which you should approach getting people to your site. “Get traffic from Google, then get noticed”? Not by a long shot; it should be the other way around: “Get noticed, then get traffic from Google.” And how do you do that? You create link bait. Cutts gave several examples: a lolcat builder, selling your moustache on eBay, a free hugs campaign, putting up tutorials, analyzing someone else’s blog, liveblogging an interesting event…and these were just a few. A directory of something very popular (like iPhone applications) or lists of reasons why something rocks or sucks also attract visitors.
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