Mikey Pants: Google’s Matt Cutts on WordPress as the best blogging platform for SEO

Google’s Matt Cutts on WordPress as the best blogging platform for SEO

via How To Make My Blog by Marko Saric on 8/24/09

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 blog 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 your blog 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 on your blog. 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 your blog though, it is about the quality and importance of places that point to you.

Relevancy is internal, it is the stuff that you write on your blog. 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 blog 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:

http://v.wordpress.com/lAZUouJF

Search engine optimization tips straight from Google

Most of these 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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