Posts Tagged matt cutts
The Future of SEO and Internet Marketing
Posted by in Search Engine Optimization on June 16, 2009
Back in 2007, Searchengingeland.com did a great interview with Matt Cutts on the future of SEO. I find it extremely interesting just how high quality Matt's advice really was. It really hinged on a few things:
- personalized search results
- local search results
- the need for a website that is more focused on a users need than the need of the search engine
Well, not suprising everything discussed has really come to pass. Google is serving up more local results and has rolled out ways to allow for increasing personalization - (the show options update and the old Google promote are just the latest examples).
Interestingly, even though this was a few years ago the advice does not yet seem to have been taken fully to heart.
Local search, personalized search, blended search and a high quality website are all more important than ever. Yet, these are often ignored by many businesses.
One interesting trend that I continue to see is that many small and mid-sized companies are paying thousands of dollars to "SEO" their website while spending next to nothing on new content and content development. This lack of focus on building and bettering their web assets is troubling. It means that search engine optimization services are being sold into a situation in which a long lasting, positive result is not really possible.
Companies need to focus on content creation and optimizing that content as the primary technique for marketing online. Certainly, things can be done to underlying meta data, existing content and site infrastructure that can all be tremendously important - yet, the paramount tasks for any Director of Marketing or Sales that is charged with managing and marketing their website should be pulled in any combination from this list:
- case study/white paper creation
- extensive encyclopedia-like articles on products and services
- frequent blog postings
- frequent on-page press releases and press release syndication
- creation of product videos/testimonial videos, etc.
Some Interesting SEO Blog Posts
Posted by in Wordpress and SEO on June 14, 2009
Here was an interesting post on the best wordpress permalink structure - interesting that Matt Cutts weighed in as well. The comments section here - where I weighed in - really disproves the central thesis of the blog post. There has been a lot of ink spilled on this topic and this should be the final word for some time to come.
If you're wondering about SEO and wordpress then you should come around soon to realizing that Wordpress is an incredible, awesome platform for creating blogs and static sites that are quite optimized.
Matt Cutts popped into a few sessions at SMX last week and confused people. Nothing new - it seems that the idea that Google will be adding weight to dofollow links that actually have traffic flowing through them is catching on. Equally interesting is his advice to worry less about about pagerank sculpting and more about getting valuable content further up in the site hierarchy. This seems logical - but on the other hand many of the most content heavy websites (like newspapers, article directories, etc.) have the majority of their current a few clicks deep. So it seems not entirely clear how large, content sites can get pages further up the hierarchy - other than ensuring content pages aren't too deep.
That is it for this week - we'll see what next week holds