Google’s Matt Cutts gives SEO tips to small business owners

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Rodney Bartlett interviews Google’s Matt Cutts at Pubcon 2007 in Las Vegas. Matt had some excellent tips for small business owners and answered a few great questions.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gscFgaMTm48

Age of Your Domain Really That Important?

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Webmasters are all concerned about what it is that is going to contribute toward the success and positive search engine rankings for their site, and rightfully so. A website that gets no exposure is hardly a website at all, at least as far as profit is concerned. While many people do have websites just for the fun of things, there is a lot of money to be made on the World Wide Web with the right kind of site. This is where search engine marketing tactics come in so important, and domain age is one of these techniques.

It is often debated whether or not the age of a domain really is relevant to the success and positive search engine rankings of a website. Some people say that domain age is a relevant thing to consider, whereas other webmasters call such a thing a myth. It is pretty safe to say that those webmasters who say that domain age has no bearing in the success of a site are those that own websites with fairly young domains, as domain age does have a direct role in the success of a website.

Domain Age Importance is Not a Myth

Contrary to popular belief, the idea of domain age importance is not just a myth. Google has been known to reward websites with older domain names and penalize the newer ones. While there is nothing wrong with opening a brand new website, there is a certain degree of authority that goes along with having a domain name that has been around for a while. The age of a domain is not something that can be made up, or faked. You cannot pay anybody to vouch for the age of a domain. Domain age is an inarguable fact, and it is thought that the older the domain is, the better it stands to fare with the search engines.

Some things can be bought, and in a way domain age can be purchased. Domain names are fairly cheap to purchase brand new, but those who want to purchase a domain name from an owner who is already using it may have to pay a pretty penny. The price of the domain name is directly related to the success that the domain has had. With that being said, if you want to purchase an aged domain name it is certainly going to cost more than the run-of-the-mill £10.

On the other hand, other elements of search engine optimization can be purchased or faked. Links can be exchanged, or even purchased although Google strongly discourages such practices. Domain age cannot be created in this way; either a domain is young or it is aged. Google considers not only the age of the domain name itself, but also the age of the content on the site. Fresh content is great for readers, but content that has been around for a while usually has a fairly good readership and is known to contain solid, useful information.

Search Engines Want to Know a Site Will Stay Around

Another reason why aged domains are useful is because the search engines want to give people useful information. When a website has been around for quite a while, it is pretty safe to say that it will be around for a while longer. The goal of a search engine is to point people toward useful information that will last. An aged domain has more authority, and search engines want to reward websites with authority.

Is There a Way to Get Around the Issue of Domain Age?

There are few ways to get around the issue of domain age. Every website was young once, and those websites that are just getting established would do best to focus their search engine marketing endeavors in another direction. In the same respect, when registering a domain name registering it for a year or more can not only save a few pounds off of the cost of registration but also indicates to the search engines that you plan on keeping your website around for a while.

There are many things that go into a successful website. Some things, like quality backlinks, can be created whereas other things like domain age just come with time. Be patient and work on other search engine marketing areas while your domain ages, or shell out the extra pounds for a domain that has already aged and is in good standing.

Google Likes Backlinks to your Website

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Most webmasters are concerned with increasing the visibility of their website on the Internet. Nowadays, a website that goes unnoticed by the search engines is a website that gets very little to no traffic and about the same amount of revenue.

If you are at all involved in the world of internet and search engine marketing, you know just how important Google is. The Google Company really is the King of the Internet world, and their search engine website ranking system, PageRank, is vital to any website’s success.

There are multiple factors that Google takes into consideration when ranking websites.

The higher a website’s PageRank is, the further toward the top of the list it will appear for search queries that are related to that site. Backlinks are one of the single most important factors that are taken into consideration when determining PageRank by Google. Backlinks are just what they sound like, links from one website back to the website in question.

Backlinks are important when determining PageRank because Google sees it as a vote in the favor of the website. This is why quality links are important; not just any link will do. For example, if a tourist authority has a backlink to a website about destination weddings in that area, Google will regard this backlink, or ‘vote’ in much more high regard than if some guy’s blog links to that site. On the other hand, if a highly ranked blog about travel links to that same destination wedding site, this can be viewed as a quality backlink as well.

Some webmasters take things a bit too far and assume that any backlink is a good one. This is not the case, and Google will actually penalize a website for linking out to one of the sites that they have deemed “internet garbage.” Known link farms are a good example of this. Links to or from link farms can actually hurt a website?s PageRank, and in return hurt a website’s visibility on the most important search engine, Google.

When determining the value of backlinks, Google looks at a number of things. They look at the link, the quality of the website that is linking to the site, the text around the link, and the anchor text (the underlined words that contain the embedded link on the website).

You Can’t Fool Google!

The worst thing that a webmaster can do is try to fool Google. This is why sites are penalized when they are linked to by known link farms, or when they link to link farms. This is not quality linking, and it creates a flaw in the system when it comes to users. There are ways to get quality backlinks, and having quality content that establishes your site as an authority in its niche is one of the single most effective ways. If other webmasters or bloggers find that your site is useful, they will link to it. This is why Google counts a link back to a website as a vote in its favor as far as relevance is concerned.

Keep in mind that if it looks like a link farm and smells like a link farm, Google is going to think it link farm.

PageRank indexing is not done by a human, but a computer program of sorts that crawls the web and looks at websites. It moves from page to page through the links going to and from it. This means that having a backlink from a relevant website will hold less weight if it also links to 200 or 300 other websites. The more links a website has leading out on a page, the less the links are bound to mean to the Google bot. Although this blog is not a link farm, just a blog with a generous owner, Google has no way of knowing the difference.

It is also important to have different backlinks pointing toward your page with different anchor text, and for the very same reason. If all pages are pointing toward your destination wedding site with the anchor text ?destination wedding,? the backlink will lose importance in the eyes of Google.

The moral of the story is this: backlinks are important.

They are, or should be, the backbone of any serious search engine marketing campaign. Google really values backlinks, and how many you have is only as important as the quality of the backlinks. If anything, quality out values quality, but with a diverse array of backlinks that are from quality sites, your site can be a winner.

How to Create a Google Site Map

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Google Site Map allows you to submit a listing of all your urls for Google to crawl.

There have been many questions concerning the procedure of creating a Google Site Map. Below is the non-Python way of creating one. (Note: Google has further documentation at their site)

First, create a file named sitemap.xml

Use the following code in any HTML editor:

Here’s a breakdown of those properties:

lastmod -
This is the date the document was last modified and uses the following formats:
dd.mm.yyyy
dd.mm.yyyy hh:mm
dd/mm/yyyy
dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm

changefreq -
Tells Google Sitemaps the frequently that content of a particular URL will change.

Your options are “always”, “hourly”, “daily”, “weekly”, “monthly”, “yearly” or “never”.

The value “always” should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value “never” should be used to describe archived URLs.

priority -
The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on your site.
You may select between 0.0 and 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s) on your website and 1.0 identifies the highest priority page(s) on your website.

Add as many pages as there are in your website.

Google Sitemap supports up to 50,000 pages per XML file.

Once you’ve completed all of those steps, you’ll need to submit your site map page.

Submit to:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

What is your Google Penalty Plan

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If you’re not thinking about this, you need to get started, and if you have started, how is it working out?

Google seems to be at a defining moment in time with it’s penalizing sites with paid links, and almost constant shifts to the algorithm that make the SERPs a guessing game just about everyday.

So what are you doing now to make sure your site survives should it be hit by a Google penalty? You might be ranked very well today and making great money from the traffic that Google sends to your site naturally – so what if they flag your site for some deserved or un-merited form of spam?

With soo many people gaming the system, no wonder Google lashes out at the SEO community on occasion. We’re the ones pushing them to provide more relevant results while at the same time doing things that some would question on a moral level.

Point is, Google delivers a ton of traffic. But the web is VERY big, and Google is not the be all and end all. You should be constantly looking for other ways to deliver traffic to your site such as:

Be active in forums – answer questions without trying to sell our product or service – instead, demonstrate your expertise in your answers and people will realize that what you say is worthy, and in turn will use your product or service when they are ready.

Write articles! I know it’s old and tiresome and boring – but like the first point, it’s a great way to not only show off what you know, but in inject your writing style. Some people will read you not for your content, but because they like the way you put things into perspective. Don’t underestimate that.

Ask for help – I know a lot of people have trouble with this, but when my car breaks down, I have no trouble calling a mechanic. Use this same approach on the web. If you need help with a problem seek out the people who can help you. Many times in that process there is an exchange of information that leads to a deeper and “real” relationship – leverage that for links!

Tell ‘em what you think – this applies to blogs, forums, articles and email responses. Why pretend to be something you’re not? Like is too short to pussyfoot around and to be taken advantage of by other people.

Use your clients! I know I just said don’t let others abuse you, and now I am saying to use your clients? What I mean is, your clients have other relationships as well, and if you perform well for them, they will refer you to their other business relationships.

See a pattern here? While Google is great for delivering text-based computer crunched results, at the end of the day, human relations (social engineering) is what makes you money. Treat people with respect, end any relationship with grace, and you’ll see that over time, that crazy thing called karma makes it way back to you.

Why Pay for Directory Links?

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One of the methods used in Search Engine Marketing is the technique of buying links.

While some frown on this method entirely, or may not need to partake in this action, there are those of us who do and reap the benefits.

Paid directory links are better for sem purposes (as opposed to text link advertising) – because good fee-based directories place your link in the appropriate category of which the site’s main topic is about.

Why does this matter?

For one moment, let’s take a look at how a search engine spider spends its life. It endlessly crawls the Internet, looking to not only discover new content, but to also find related topics, fresh information and to also somehow apply all of that knowledge together in order to algorithimically produce the most relevent result.

So, as the search spider continues to find your site listed in the same category through-out the web, (for this example we’ll use “Software”) it makes it easier for the spider to categorize your site. This partially explains why you may see some sites that appear in listings that are not 100% on target.

When the search spider repeatedly finds a website within the “Software” category on many directories, and the site in question is about software, it makes the ranking easier to compute for the search engine when delivering results from a user query.

Another factor that is added to the computation is the link weight – basically, of all the links that the search spider found linking to your site, how many of them were any or all of the following:

• Relevant
• Lead the search spider to a topical page
• Are from a “Trusted” or “Authority” site

All of these are great reasons to pay for fee-based directories that take the time to carefully review sites that are listed – take advantage of this great opportunity!

Content Optimization

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Good copy equals conversions.

This is probably the hardest selling point to get across to a client when seo speak begins. Sure people know they need to get ranked in Google, and they know you need to build an online presence, and of course, they all know that they need to get traffic to their site.

But site copy? Anytime that topic is brought up, most clients proudly boast that they have already posted their brochure’s information on their site and that works just fine.

Well, it doesn’t. Content optimization is a skill that few people possess. Words sell, images don’t. You need to get the user to take action! So, in that spirit, here is a list of things to do and ones to avoid:

Things to do:

• Use the main keyphrase you are targeting on every page, except for the home page.
• Use keyphrases in your hyperlinks.
• Create a page title that is intriguing and eye catching. Remember words sell, graphics don’t.
• Limit your keyword usage to 2 or 3 keywords per page. Otherwise, you may get tagged for keyword spamming.
• Create supplemental content like FAQ pages, how-to pages, industry glossary and related articles about the product.
• Use the description meta tag. Google refers to this when it can’t find content or a listing in DMOZ.
• Always keep an eye on competitors and how they rank for the same keywords.
• Focus on the the pages that have your best conversion rates.
• Think like a reporter, asking the five W questions (who, what, when, where, why).
• Display your location. Studies indicate that people look for local vendors, even when online.

Things to avoid:

• Inserting keywords into copyrighted material.
• Forgetting what your audience is looking for.
• Leaving the title of your page as “Untitled”.
• Using too many graphics.
• Waiting to implement copy changes for expected seasonal sales. You need 6-months when optimizing seasonal content to give the engines time to adjust to your alterations.

Content optimization is a continual process of monitoring and updating. By staying true to this course, you’ll see the results in your sales.