Jul
25
Lisa Barone from BruceClay.com gives a recap of the SEO advice provided by Matt Cutts at the Wordpress Wordcamp this past weekend. There are some interesting tidbits included.
Here are the highlights:
- Don’t put your blog at the root page of your domain in case you decide to do something other than a blog in the future.
- Name your directory “blog†not “Wordpressâ€.
- Use category names that are good keywords.
- Use the SEO Title plug-in to make your keywords more prevalent.
- If you want to get into Google News, you’ll need to add multiple authors.
- The file extension used in your URL won’t affect your rankings, unless it’s “exeâ€.
- Use Alt attributes when adding images, videos, audio files, etc. to your posts.
- Google does not care about the number of slashes in a URL… so URLs like blog/year/month/day/title are not a problem.
- Underscores and hyphens both will be treated as word separators by Google.
There are other SEO tips for bloggers included so I recommend you check out the entire article.
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Excellent list, it clarifies a few issues that Google isn’t open about.
Yeah, it’s a great list!
Luckily, I managed to be doing most of these (somehow…)
Interesting point about google news **hires guestbloggers**
Why?
I think the tip about multiple authors is a very interesting one.
Actually you do not have to ‘hire’ guest bloggers. You just have to have more than one author, you can post via aliases.
Although, I am about to start asking for some guest bloggers in a month or so.
Aliases – I’ve never though of that! That’s pure evil!
Actually, can someone explain to me how having more than 1 author helps with Google News? What if you do not put the author of the post in the page?
Does more than 1 author really matter?
Same question…
Digital Inspiration{labnol.blogspot.com} already featured in Google News and has only one author
No idea how it why it would matter but since he works for Google, I will have to take his word for it.
That multiple authors thing is a big secret me thinks. Hm. I wonder how google reads that information for a site. Hmmmmmm.
interesting… thank you david and lisa. i have made a mental note.
Great advice, wish I’d known about this earlier…
Good article – Matt is a funny guy really. Isn’t he?
some very good advice there!
Darin
Lisa does a great job of recaping Matt’s key points at Wordcamp, gee I wish I had gone, well maybe next year.
Thanks for these tips, David. I’ve been meaning to move my blog to the sub dir of “blog” for quite awhile now….
Althought it looks from the full article, he might have said a few things he didn’t want to say … LOL
Darin
great Tips
And I think I don’t do the first list : make a blog in Root Domain.. And My category Names are bad too,,, But I’m too lazy to fix it..
Interesting list. I ought to tidy my blog up.
I am still trying to understand the bullet –
If you do not have something else what is wrong with having your blog at the root of your domain. All you are doing is building the reputation of your domain name. If you want to put something else there in the future, subdomaining your blog is not a real tough task and a killer .htaccess file can work wonders in redirecting. After you have moved your blog to the subdomain, just have a nice graphic alerting those who type in your domain directly to the new location
Can someone clue me in on what I am missing?
I think the point is to give yourself options, just in case you do what to change your site (I’m guessing)…
The one part of this that I think is the problem…”subdomaining your blog is not a real tough task and a killer .htaccess file can work wonders in redirecting”…..if you end up moving your blog to a sub-directory off of your domain after you’ve been blogging for a few months, doesn’t this affect the indexing of all of your posts in google?? i.e.: on my site, what was once http://www.thefitshack.com/2007/04/03/how-to-use-your-brain-to-lose-weight/ will now be: (http://www.thefitshack.com/blog/2007/04/03/how-to-use-your-brain-to-lose-weight/)
So, even with redirects set up in .htaccess, won’t this affect how your posts rank in the search engines? If you have a top ranking post in google, could it get knocked down through re-indexing once google crawls your site and finds the new urls?
I’m very interested in feedback from anyone who has moved their blog after they already had been blogging for 6 months or so, and hearing whether or not this affected you negatively. If I’m wrong about this and it won’t have a negative affect on my post rankings by moving my blog, I’d really like to know. I’ve been meaning to move my blog and now a few months have gone by, so I wonder if I should do it now or not.
Thanks!
If you use the proper 301 redirect you should should not see any drop in rankings. The 301 redirect tells Google that this page has permanently moved and since Matt has already told us this:
We know that adding another subdirectory to the URL does not matter. So in my opinion, if your .htaccess file is setup properly you will not lose any rankings.
With that said, do you have something else planned for your main URL? If not, I probably wouldn’t change.
If you don’t ever intend to do anything but blog then it is ok to install your blog in the root of your domain. He just means that should you decide to do something else later, it is an easier transition to make if you have the blog in a subdirectory.
Thanks David, I’m still not convinced that this won’t affect rankings….just because Google “doesn’t care” about how many slashes are in a url still doesn’t mean that the url has changed….and I understand what you’re saying about redirecting using .htaccess.
I was hoping to hear how it went for anyone who has done this after having already been blogging. It sounds like you will be leaving your blog as is….I will have to decide if I want to change mine or not. Thanks very much for your feedback David.
Definitely a great starting point for anyone regarding basic SEO. Thanks for sharing I think this will serve alot of people well!
Very good list.
What was interesting was “If you want to get into Google News, you’ll need to add multiple authors”…
Hmmm…I gotta get more authors for my blog now
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This all seems like pretty straight-forward stuff, but it is worth reminding is all of the basics from time to time!
- Martin Reed
One can never get enough SEO tips! Thanks!
SEO Tips never ends thanks for sharing