semwired

We all know SEO is not science: most of SEO practices come from direct experience or reliable source but there’s som much uncertainity that makes everything blend into doubts.

That’s the reason why advices coming straight from Matt Cutts or the Google webmaster blog should be taken definetely seriously. We’ve already seen Matt getting into certain topics put into the spotlight of the SEO community and giving useful (altough sometimes ambigous) insight.

This time he realeased a bunch of slides he presented to the 2009 San Francisco Wordcamp

Following is a resume of the main points he discussed:

Crawlers and PageRank algorithm

• Google spiders go crowling pages in a pagerank order: highest pagerank pages get crawled before pages with a lower pagerank
• Being relevant and reputable is the actual criteria that works behind the Page Rank

Keywords and content optimization

• When it comes to keywords, put yourself into the user shoes: think about what he would type in his search string
• Do not think about stuffing your pages with keywords: write naturally.
• ALT attribute are handy (3-4 relevant words)

WordPress

• Set your permalink to domain.com/post-title (setting -> reading -> custom permalink structure /%postname%/)
• Modify your titles and file names (urls) acconrding to the content

This is the powerpoint format. Slides are also available from Google Docs.

Finally a few words from Google about the last algorithm update. According to the last news, this last change would have affected SERP pushing up all brand connected keywords. For instance, a query on “cars” would have brought up all major car producers at the top of the SERP.

In this short video, Matt Cutts explains the change in detail. Basically the update will push up websites depending on a particular set of value:

1. trust
2. authority
3. reputation
4. PageRank
5. high quality

Oddily enough, emphasizing these parameters made the big brands rise up in the SERPS, as pointed out here.

Anyway, Matt Cutts says that a query on “eclipse” doesn’t bring up any link to a Mitsubishi page which should confirm the fact that brand names are not getting any help in SERPs.

There’s only one way to find this out: is there any brand with a recent made website with no reputation, PageRank, trust and authority which ranks high on SERP?