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SEO Tips From Matt Cutts

It's not often Google comes right out with highly specific SEO advice. But when it is there, people hang on every ort of minutia. Earlier this week, chief webspam fighter Matt Cutts had them dangling at the WordPress WordCamp as he connected some nuts and bolts.

Key SEO Takeaways from Matt Cutts' Presentation

URLs:

Underscores are now treated as word separators
File extensions (.htm, .html, .php, .asp, .aspx, .jsp) won't affect rankings
But avoid .exe
The number of slashes doesn't matter (for Google)
Dynamic URLs are treated the same as static
Question marks are cool, but don't overuse the equals sign (2 or 3 limit)
Don't go back and tweak old URLs, just keep tips in mind for the future


Usability:


Site is crawlable
Dates of posts are conspicuous
Double check for mobile browsing
Full-text RSS for user loyalty
Standard pings

Switching IPs:
Reduce time-to-live
Back up site, bring up on new IP
Watch Googlebot until it indexes new IP
Take down old site

Moving Domains:
301 redirect one subdirectory at a time, testing
Notify linkers and ask them to update links
Standardize backlinks, choose www or non-www

Other Advice:

SEO Title Plugin for switching out blog title with post title
Use Alt attributes with photos, 3-4 relevant words
Dashes are best, then underscores

No spaces are worst
Use a thesaurus
Use a different stylesheet, not different site for mobile/iPhone

in case someone missed it,I thought it nice of google seems they allways keep it there litle secret


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User Comments

  1. yarinh
    Sounds great.

    Check out my tech biz blog, you're gonna love it.

    www.boldinvestors.com/
  2. slyvisions
    Those were very nice tips. I'm going to go ahead and fix some of my URL links.
  3. jimbozs2000
    Yea it comes straight from google,there new changes they just made...takes the guess work out
  4. cocoy000
    Nice tips indeed. Now I just found out no spaces were worst.

    By the way, can anyone check if the secrets in these videos were real?. I kInd of tried it and I'm still waiting for the results.

    Here: www.squidoo.com/seo-artist

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