Caydel’s SEO Blog

Here’s the first in the series of videos posted by Google’s Matt Cutts to Google Video over the past year. These are important for every web developer to see. Please see Matt’s first!

See the rest of the videos!

Transcription

OK. lets try a few questions and answers. I don’t know if this will work. So, lets give it a shot. (Picks up the first letter) Ralph writes in. He says,

“Some comments on sitemaps please. It seems updates on sitemaps depend on page views of a site”.

No Ralph. that’s not really true. As far as I understand it, page views are not really a factor on when things are updated in sitemaps. So, there are different pieces of data with in sitemaps. Imagine five different little pieces of data. They can all be updated at different times and at different frequencies. Typically they will be updated, you know, with-in days or worst case, with-in weeks. However, as far as I know, its not dependant on page views.

Lets try another one. (Picks up another letter)

“What are some general guidelines and recommendations you would make to people who desire to increase their site’s visibility on Google.”

Wow! OK. So, this is a meaty topic. Definitely a longer issue. But lets go ahead and dive into it.

So, in general, the number one thing that most people kind of make mistake on, on SEO is, they don’t make their site crawlable.

So you want to look at your site, either through a search engine’s eyes or you know, use a text browser, do something and go back to 1994 and use Links or something like that. If you can get through your entire site using only a text browser, then you are going to be in pretty good shape, because most people don’t even bother about crawlability.

You also want to have things like sitemaps on your site, and you can also use our site maps tool in addition to that.

Once you have got your content and you want to have good content, content that’s interesting you know, a reason why somebody would want to link to you and your site is actually crawlable, then you need to go about marketing, promoting or optimizing your site.

So, the main things that I would advise are, think about the people who are really relevant to your niche and make sure that they know about you.
If you are associated with a doctor, because you have got some medical kind of website, make sure that the doctor knows about you and if he has got a website, it might be appropriate for him to link to you.

You also want to be thinking about a hook, something that’s viable. It can be really good content, for example, newsletters, tutorials, I would set it up all these video stuff, trying to make it look semi-professional.

There were tutorials by a company called Photoflex(??), they were saying here is how to make the fill light, the key light and all that sort of stuff and oh by the way, you can buy our equipment to do that. That’s really really smart and infact, another photography site that I went to, they had syndicated their tutorial lessons to that other (photoflex)website. So, content can be a great way to get links. You can also look at things like digg, Slashdot, Tearrank(?), Reddit, you know, social networking sites, MySpace, those sort of things.

But fundamentally you need something interesting that sets you apart from the pack.

Once you got something like that, then you are going to be in much better shape as far as promoting your site is concerned. But again, the biggest step is making sure that your site is crawlable. After that, making sure that you got content, and then finally trying to do the best you can to find some hook, some reason why users would love your site, return to it and bookmark it.

Alright. Lets do another one! (picks up another letter)

“What conditions”, asks Brian M, ”call Google to use DMOZ snippet when there is already a valid meta description tag on the page?”

That’s a really good question. I actually had to go and ask the snippets team. I was like “Hi, why does this happen?”.

I am not going to go into too much of detail, but here’s the way you should think about it. Suppose that you have a page about Christina Aguilera or something like that and your open directory snippet is something about Britney Spears. Well, if you type in or some user types in Britney Spears, that’s going to be a much better snippet.

So the way I would be thinking about it is that there is always a scoring process which does all this selection to say, OK you are the best document to be returned. Once we have selected and scored your document, so that, you are going to be returned at a certain slot on the search engines.

Now what you need do is to think, is the open directory snippet or my meta tag a better match for what the user actually typed in.
Its actually ‘query dependant’. That is, depending on query the user typed, we say, well, we think that the meta description tag from the open directory project or from your meta tags is going to be a better match for the user’s query. Then based on that, we try to say, OK, in that case lets go with the meta-tags, or in this other case lets go with the open directory project.

Now you can, If you don’t like the open directory snippet, you can use the meta ‘noodp’ tag and that will prevent us from using the description from the open directory project. So you have sort of the ability to scope things a little bit and choose which things you want to have happen(?).

Alright! (Picks up another letter) This one is a good one. Lara McKenzie(??) writes in.

She says, “does Google favor ‘bold’ over ’strong’ tags?” (Sigh).

In general, we probably favor bold just a little bit more, but its so slight that I wouldn’t really worry about it. I would go ahead and do your markup how ever you want to do it, not worrying so much about “oh if I use a tag like this I am going to get a little bit of boost in Google” or something like that. Any kind of effect like that is relatively small. So in general, I do what ever is best for users or whatever is best for you site and then not worry much about it after that.

I think I am going to go ahead and upload what we got so far, see how it looks and hopefully I will be back in a bit.

Transcription thanks to Peter T. Davis

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