Check out these interviews with a bunch of search engine personalities. The most viewed one is the one below with Matt Cutts:
2 Things to point out:
1. The importance of an XML sitemap. With a sitemap you are making Google’s job of crawling your site much easier. If you want to get a deep crawl of your site then make sure you have a site map. (*Ubertor offers this functionality)
2. Avoid Flash and Javascript menus. Eventhough Google is getting better at crawling Java and Flash menus, the easiest menus for them to crawl are the menus built with text links and styled using CSS. If you are using Flash, then you are just making the search engine work harder to crawl all their pages. (*Ubertor uses text links and CSS)
Video Transcription:
RB:
Hi, I’m Rodney Barter with Reachd and I were PubCon in Vegas 2007 and we just set in on Matt Cutts in the hot seat so were talking with Matt Cutts from Google. And i guess maybe if you wouldn’t mind, for people that don’t know you just Introduce yourself and tell us what you do.
MC:
Yeah absolutely, my name is Matt Cutts. I’m the head of Web Spam in Google. An Web Spam is a group within Google of search quality. So engine where we get complains about engine and try to fix them and try to make sure that they work better, we look at new algorithms. So my specific job is when people try to cheat, we find ways to make that stop and make it work and scaleable and robust way. But we get up in the morning gotta think about how can we deliver search result everyday.
RB:
Cool. So you talk last night a little bit about wordpress, you mention know if you’re using wordpress, they’re doing all the stuff for you on your SEO. You could you tell us a little bit about some of the things that wordpress does?
MC:
Totally, so wordpress is a blogging software package, weblog, you know so pleople who want can keep an online diary or talk about any topic they want to. Worpress is open-source, which is a really nice feature because you can download it for free, you can install it on your own server and then you can find a ton of plug-ins. Since its open source, people love to hack on it. The greatest thing is the latest version of WordPress that just came out recently is WordPress 2.3. And what that does is it pays attention to,you know sometimes if you write a blog, you wanna put the same blog post in three or four different places, P=and then post number or you know a permalink here, and wordpress 2.3 tries to take all of that and put all the post in one spot. And what that means is they’re doing all the work and for free you’re getting software to do SEO pretty well.
RB:
So its like, it deals with the duplicate content issue and…
MC:
As much as you can. you know there’s always a case for you can say ‘Ok here is the content for october and here is the content for October 20th and so you can until you still have the entry in different places but its still much much better than it was before.
RB:
Cool. And you know what are things that we hear a lot is and we try to teach people in our cross that content is keen, you know, provide relativist content to your users. Don’t write for the Search Engines but write for the people who are doing business with, so that’s one of what we try to teach. So what kind of the next big sort of this is the next big SEO tip you could throw out there.
MC:
Excellent, yeah, good question. One of the things I would definitely recommend is think about what the users are going to type. A lot of people you know, a few in the medical area, you know what the right word is. But supposed you’ll gonna target USB thumbdrives right? Some people are gonna type flash drives, some people are gonna type thumb drive, some people are gonna tip USB drives, and you need to have all of those words on the page so the search engine knows that’s what its about. So i think that’s one really big thing. Another thing is, you know, make sure that you offer some useful service. We have somebody that was doing a language translation site and they were wondering why do i rank it number one? that’s why they check out their site and it was literally just like a brochure, like 5 pages, contact us, about, this is what we do. And I look at who the number one site was and the number one site was talking about Japanese-English translation and it had a many little tutorial. Here’s how you can write your name in Japanese, whats the difference between katakana and hiragana, and all these really need facts. And so there’s a compelling resource there . There was a reason why people comeback to it and talk about it and it wasn’t just here’s our company, here’s what we can do for you.
RB:
Thanks that was good. So small business owners totally new to this they don’t maybe know what a title tag is, or meta tag, so all that stuff is overwhelming. So what will you advise me to jump into this SEO Search Engine Optimization world.
MC:
It can be confusing that can be a little scary but don’t be scared. I mean the more time you spend on it, the better you get. And I’ve seen what happen with adwords is people will buy adwords the first day they make mistake, that’s a natural thing. But the more time you put in on it, the better and better you get. And that;’s the exact same way with SEO. So for example, there’s all this free resources out there, good forms where you can find out more information. you could also use Goggle Webmaster central which is at Google.com/webmasters, and what you can do is to register to prove that you own a site, and then we’ll give you all kind of stats. The queries you’re shown up for, the clicks that people are doing, you can test out your robots.txt which is like a no trespassing electronic sign, and some people actually forbid search engine from visiting their site and then they get angry saying why don’t you crawl in at me. And so we have this kind of tools and checklist to help them with that. And google has a lot of free resources, we have as known as the local business center, where if you have a brick and mortar business, supposed your a florist and you’re on you know one corner of the hoe town, you can tell us your address and show up for free in google local and google maps. And that’s you know you don’t have to pay for inclusion, there’s no recurring charge. That’s just helps us because we can return better search results and it helps you, the small town business owner, because you can be fun by people who are searching for you business.
RB:
Could you talk about that google maps thing specially for the search result so sometime the map shows the top with the top 3 and then there’s the regular search results, and how are those two worlds mix, do they mix and all that.
MC:
Surely, yeah you know, sometimes you’ll see somebody doing a search and you just know its navigational. you know they’re looking for a Bob’s florist, you know and more head Kentucky and something like that, and that is where you really want at like a business listing and you hopefully a map will kinda give you some contacts And then if someday is just doing a search like best florist, well then they weren’t necessarily looking for somebody having business name of Best Florist or something like that. So we have very interesting algorithm where we try to predict are they looking for a specific name o a business or are they looking for a local business and maybe they don’t know the name, or they’re just doing a sort of background research right now. And people can’t change those algorithm that’s sort o google prerogative to tweak things to be more relativist, but you can register, make sure that you have business name and you address on your webpage, all those sort of things which really helps.
RB:
Ok, cool, thanks. Just a question to hear about the webmaster tools that you mention, we’ll try to encourage people to set that up, and the sitemap specially, can you talk about the importance of the sitemap and what that does.
MC:
Yeah so, a sitemap can tell Google hey these are the URLs that are important to me, you keep instead of priority in your sitemap file. But most importantly when your first starting out, you might not have lot of links. And so we might not crawl your site very deeply. And so if you have that sitemap , you at least telling Google hey I’ve got 20 pages andthese are what the URLs are. Now, its not a guarantee. We don’t say if you give us these sitemaps we promise we’ll crawl these pages. And you could immediately see where a bad guy would like make a thousand domains and submit sitemaps for each domains. So we cant guarantee it but we do try to say, you know lets see how my pages we can get from this domain so it absolutely cannot hurt your site to do, it can only help and opefully help for more more of the time.
RB:
I know this isn’t maybe your are but Google Base, we work a lot with reel estate agents. And in Canada, you know, Google doesn’t show on the search results but on the states it does, is there plans for any change there, or do you know?
MC:
That’s a good question, we always look at what’s good for the users. So if we didn’t have enough data for Canada, we didn’t have enough feeds that are relevant in Canada, then we might not be unlikely to show it but overtime I will hop that more and more people are using Google Base because that’s another free tool where you can submit data and sometimes it will show up. So I think personally it would be really nice as far as what exactly the future holds, even I don’t know.
RB:
Just a question here about video, where kinda new to this video world, we got some good gear, its fun! We got a good time last night, we got a party running around, videoing everyday. But any way indexing video should we post video on YouTube, should we post on Google, video where should it go, and how do we make sure that it get’s found I guess.
MC:
Yeah, totally. Well here’s a few tips. If its less than 10 ins, YouTube, you can put it up, no problem at all. If its more than 10 mins, like an our long interview Google Video, you can do a longer form video, If you can, it really makes a big difference if you make transcript, and I’ve even seen some people who will take the video, they’ll ship off the files you know, you can ship it to India or something like that I’ll pay 2 cents per word o whatever and they’ll transcribe it for you. Because search engine still has a problem indexing spoken stuff, things in video, audio, and stuff like that. So if you have a transcript, or you can do good meta tags or think about what people will gonna type so Video, SEO, Mac facts, Interview, webmaster world, and then put that into the description and make sure that there’s some meta tags or some tags there, as we do search over those through video search.
RB:
I guess one last question about indexing. When we teach people we try to talk about, in the navigation having maybe CSS or using bulleted list so that your navigation though out your site is really crawlable, i supposed to flash or javascript. Could you kinda comment on that?
MC:
Yeah, absolutely. Engine will, if you sort of take like an old old version of netscape like netscape 4 or there’s even text browsers like link, that’s a good ones, when you look at your website in that, that’s almost what your website looks like to a bot. And so if you got flash or if you got Javascript, it can be kinda hard to interpret all of that and to find the links. Now I’m, personally I’m a little bias coz I work for Google, but personally I think google doe a very goo job of putting sort of links out of Javascript and stuff. But you gotta think about every search engines, coz what if 5 years from now Gigablast or Excelee or Turboten or all these other search engine are popular, and every search engine has to do extra work to be able to crawl that javascrpt, to crawl that flash. So the easier you can make it, for any search search engine, the more simple, you know that just make it just much more likely that you’ll be crawled. So the advice that we give is if you have a page, have flash as the decoration you know you can have lots of good flash thats interesting but have the navigation be an HTML and that way the bots can crawl everywhere.
RB:
Cool.
MC:
Good deal.
RB:
Great,
MC:
Yeah.
RB:
Thanks a lot for your time.
MC:
That was a lot of fun. Thank you very much.
RB:
Sure.