Category: Search Engine Optimization

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Matt Cutts on WordPress SEO

If you can’t see this YouTube video, you can watch it on YouTube.

In this video you’ll see pure unvarnished personable Matt Cutts, cat lover, talking about blogging and WordPress. Although the video is really for a newbie webmasters and not really for hard core SEO pros.

There are some good nuggets in the video and here they are:

  1. WordPress takes care of about 90% of the mechanics of search engine optimization.
  2. You can optimize WordPress with a few simple plug-ins.
  3. Matt likes Cookies for Comments and Enforce www Preference for his own blog.
  4. PageRank is the number of people that link to you and how important they are. The higher your PageRank the higher you’ll place organically. Quantity is not important, but rather the quality of links.
  5. You can flow through your PageRank to other sites by linking out to them. But the authority decays with each link.
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Why I am Watching Co-Citation

I get asked all the time, “what are you watching, what’s new and exciting, what trends to you see happening?” Right now, I’m watching co-citation.Google has made really sweeping changes to how it rates websites and what used to work for years to garner organic placement is not considered spammy by Google and may even run into a placement smackdown filter. This is why I am very carefully and intensely watching co-citation.

Watching co-citation.
Watching co-citation.

Here are a few articles about co-citation that you may want to read:

SEOMoz take on co-citation

Jim Boykin’s take on co-citation

In lay terms, co-citation is close to link bait and article marketing but with natural growth. Both authors state that Google and Bing as so smart now that they do not have to be fed keyword phrases, they will decide on their own based on the content that links to you. But, here’s the change it is not the link text that they are weighing, but rather the jist of the content where the link to your website is embedded. In fact, the page that links to you may not even link to your service and may not even contain keywords on which you want to place. Instead it is an “authority” factor.

So here’s what I understand so far…

Google and Bing spider the web, they read incidents of mentions of your name and content, they spider your own website and get a picture of the services you provide, then they review how what people say about you and the authority of the site that links to your site talks about you. They then use this in their algorithm to place you in importance to being an authority on a specific topic. Way Cool!

Although I don’t think that anyone in my industry really knows yet what works for organic placement in this new world on Google and Bing, but it is clear that content, the sharing of your content will be a very strong impact for organic placement.

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More on Google+ Communities and Why I Like Them

I have been doing some testing on running and participating in Google+ Communities. Many SEO’s including myself feel that Google+ Communities may be the next “big” thing for getting SEO placement on Google.com.

Here’s what I’ve found out while using Google+ Communities.

1. I like them! They are interesting fast paced and fun to use. I am involved in several in my industry and the quality of information exchange is excellent. It’s like Quora but focused only in your industry.

2. What a great way to get Google+ followers. With some interaction in your own and other communities you can really build your circle numbers fast. I am now in 400 circles and not only is this great for getting your message out, but this number now appears under your AuthorRank tag in Google.com on anything you write. This really gives your content credibility and may push your content up in the SERPs.

3. By setting up your own communities you widen your circles and add to the ability so share your message plus your message when shared and +1’nd may receive more authority in the SERPs as others in your own industry are talking about you. Additionally, your Community posts may actually appear in the Google index. If you have verified your Author status, you get even more juice and exposure.

Here’s what Google just sent to me this last week about my own authorship status. You can click the image and read the full information.

Google Authorship Status
Google Authorship Status

I like Google+ Communities and see only positives at this point for their use. Although they do take time because there is nothing you can automate for business owners the time investment appears to have really big benefits when it comes to web visibility and web authority.

Join our own Google+ Communities we have two: AdWords Strategies and Bing Ad Strategies.

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Using HubSubHubBub to Tag Your Content for Google

Writters Need to Follow These Important Steps to Tag Their Content
Writers Need to Follow These Important Steps to Tag Their Content

On Monday I spoke a little about HubSubHubBub which Google recommends as a way to push out to the Web and tag your unique content to protect your AuthorRank for organic placement. In this post I want to dive a little deeper into this topic to help you understand how using these tools can help you with organic placement.First, I recommend that if you are a blogger that you set up your feed to be delivered by Feedburner which is a Google property. It is easy to set up and account and migrate your blog feed to Feedburner. You’ll end up with a feed that looks like this: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheWebAuthority instead of a WordPress generated feed that would look like http://www.mccordweb.com/weblogs/feed.xml. Make sure to select in the publicize tab to connect your feed to PingShot so you are pushing your content out.

Second, use the FD Feedburner Plugin for WordPress to override all settings in your blog platform to point to your new Feedburner RSS feed. It is simple to do once you have your Feedburner account set up.

Third, set up an account at FriendFeed. This is a fairly old application but one that I like and with the ability to push content to it now with Feedburner it operates as a hub for HubSubHubBub which will tag your content. At Feedburner make sure to link not your blog URL, but rather to link your Feedburner feed URL. This action completes the process to tie everything neatly together.

Here’s a great article I found that taught me how to take these steps for my own blog as part of my research for this post. I’d like to thank Jorge Escobar for his excellent article and tips. You can also watch this video about HubSubHubBub to understand why using these protocols are now best practices for any blog and writer.