Matt Cutts recently gave a talk on “Whitehat SEO tips for Bloggers” at a WordCamp 2007 conference. Who is Matt Cutts? He is the guru of all things Google; he currently heads Google’s Webspam team and has been working at Google for 7 years.
There are some important new points that he brings up in his lecture.
- Underscores (found in urls) are now going to be treated as word separators by Google. Previously, urls that you would think were keyword rich would actually be the opposite if separated by underscores – so www.americas_best_pie would only be taken by the googlebot as literally Americas_best_pie – but not anymore.
- The only way to get your blog into Google News is to have multiple authors- this being a Google News requirement for inclusion.
- Use relevant synonyms when you can in your blog – they can be as good as your more “obvious” keywords.
For more tips and comments -- Stephanie Booth provides a more detailed recap of the lecture in her blog
For the video on the talk check this post by John Pozadzides . You might be interested in reading Matt Cutt’s own comments on his talk in his blog . For those who don’t have time to disseminate the presentation or sit through an hour of the video it might be worth your time to refer to Stephan Spencer’s post on the lecture.
