WordPress conference WordCamp was held in San Francisco on May 30th 2009 and in attendance were more than 700 bloggers from more than 30 countries all around the world.
One of the most exciting presentations was Google’s Matt Cutts on why WordPress is the best blogging platform in terms of search engine optimization, SEO. Matt Cutts is the head of the Web Spam team at Google.
WordPress is a “fantastic choice” for SEO
Matt Cutts praised WordPress for being a fantastic choice for an SEO-friendly platform. WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues, bloggers might have. It is a fantastic piece of software, it makes your site easily crawlable by search engines, solves some 80-90% of mechanics of SEO and is the first big step anyone can take towards creating a popular online business.
Straight from Google – What bloggers need to know about SEO
Google cares about relevancy and reputation. You want your blog to be a very reputable place with a lot of relevant quality content about your topic.
- Reputation is external, it is what people say about you and how people link to you from their blogs, websites, and social media. For gaining a good reputation and good links, high quality, linkable / sharable content makes a difference. Publish videos. Videos are very sharable and linkable, they spread fast and they tend to rank very well in Google’s search engine results. It is not all about the number of links pointing to you though, it is about the quality and importance of places that point to you.
- Relevancy is internal, it is the stuff that you write. To be relevant you need to think about what your target group would type into Google to find the topics to write about. Think in regular English, in language that people in your target group speak. Use Google Keyword Tool to find the demand for the different keywords. When you know keywords that you want to target, include those keywords naturally when writing your articles.
Basically Matt Cutts’ advice was to not worry about small things, but to spend time on writing great and targeted content that your audience would share and link to.
What you can do to optimize WordPress for search engines
- Create a permanent redirect of your domain name. Choose either www version or non-www version and stick with it.
- Create a custom permalink structure of your blog posts and pages. Having keywords from your blog post titles in your blog URL is a very important step in ranking well in search engines.
- If you use categories when publishing your blog posts, make sure that categories have keywords in them as well.
- Notice that you can have a blog post title being different than the URL itself. That can help in covering a few more keywords that you couldn’t cover if they were both identical.
- Show related blog posts at the end of your articles to reduce bounce rate and increase page views and time spent on your blog.
- Make sure to use a WordPress theme with a clean code. Matt Cutts is using the Thesis Theme on his blog and he has praised it for doing good CSS handling.
- Always keep your blog software upgraded to the latest version to secure your WordPress blog. Previous versions of WordPress are easier to hack and that can affect your search engine rankings negatively.
Matt Cutts on WordPress blogging platform – full video
This is the complete WordPress SEO presentation of Matt Cutts from WordCamp San Francisco on May 30th 2009:
Search engine optimization tips straight from Google
Most of these blog SEO tips are well known for experienced WordPress bloggers. But they are very new and valuable to thousands of new bloggers who are installing WordPress blogs for the first time these days. And it is always good to have the tips directly from the biggest and most important search engine in the world. They make the rules and it is in your interest to follow them to spread the word of your blog to as many people as possible.
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It may be the best, but it’s certainly not without its faults. Would love to see Wordpress add standard options on how to display posts outside the homepage (e.g. post titles only for archives).
Thesis theme has the option for display of archives. You can display them as titles only, as teasers or excerpts via a simple click in the Thesis interface.
Isn’t this pretty much common sense? Woo ground breaking news!
Sure he didn’t tell us any Google secrets but it is important not to make assumptions about your target group. Matt Cutts did a 40 minute presentation and got a lot of positive reviews around the blogosphere for this, so I do not think it was that common sense for many.
Interesting getting SEO advice from a blogger that admits to ignore basic and standard SEO principles.
From this blog Do not worry about SEO just concentrate on your blog readers
“@Gerald Weber – I actually do not write meta keywords or description at all, even though Thesis has the option built in. I tend not to think about other search engines other than Google. Google sends me some 99.9% of all search traffic after all.”
My advice Marko is if you are going to ignore very very basic SEO concepts please don’t try to give any SEO advice at all.
Hmm these tips are from Matt Cutts first of all. Second of all META tags are not mentioned anywhere. And third of all I still do not waste my time writing META tags as I live in 2009.
Nice bit of information shared. I am a regular reader of Matt Cutts. I watched the video and was very entertained with his presentation. Had some good pointers as well!
He did very well indeed. Some tips for users, some fun facts here and there… he kept it interesting for the audience.
nice information, without doubt wordpress is the most powerful blog platform on the internet.
thanks,
Good post, I love wordpress. Cool new Twitter and Email buttons on the left!
Good post, I love wordpress. Cool new Twitter and Email buttons on the left!
Sorry… forgot to say great post – can’t wait to read your next one!
Hi Marko,
Matt confirmed what people already know here. Good to share it though and some solid advice for newbie bloggers.
The frustrating thing for me is that Matt goes on about site structuring and using keywords appropriately, how then does he explain Google ranking for the keyword caffeine?? You see the truth is ranking high for competitive keywords is all about your links and more specifically your anchor text. The Google page I mentioned ranks 2 nd I think and does not mention the keyword “caffeine once” !
The advice Matt gives in the video is great fro ranking for low competition keywords, anything with more than 1000 searchers a month needs some serious link building.
At what point did he say “best” SEO blogging service. I heard him say “good,” even “great, but not “best”
I have heard tips over and over again. I feel content of the blog matters and how many people link your blog. Then it is high chances of your blog getting in top 10 of search engines.
Cat food may have good commercials for promotion. But if the cats don’t like it, then the Cat food will be on shelves for a long time.
Content matters !!!
Regards,
Santosh Puthran
What I increasingly like (or am discovering) about WP is the way it can be used like a traditional CMS platform. This is another really good reason for using WP, i think.
Cat food may have good commercials for promotion. But if the cats don’t like it, then the Cat food will be on shelves for a long time.
Thank you for sharing this! Great and comprehensive post.
Cheers!
Thanks for that article. One big thing I got out of that was similar articles they may be interested in at the bottom. I’m going to add that for now on.
Bill Morgan
The Job Swami Speaks…The Career Blog
Yeah! i agree with it that Wordpress can be a great SEO booster for the bloggers. Some built in WP option like adding meta tag, header tag customization or like that can be a great tools for SEO.
Wordpress is the better CMS not just for SEO. I know I’ve used them all… well the major ones at least, like Drupal and Joomla. I’ve seen great results now that I moved everything over to WP. Not only on traffic but on productivity as well. WP hands down is the best CMS out there.