Notorious Google SEO expert Matt Cutts can be seen giving a talk in San Francisco in the video above. It’s really useful to watch if you’re trying to boost your WordPress SEO skills. He explains how WordPress SEO works from Google’s point of view. First off, he praises anyone who blogs using WordPress because he reckons it fixes the mechanics of SEO for you, just because it’s a great piece of software. However, that’s just the mechanics; you still need a WordPress SEO strategy, and Matt has plenty of helpful advice on that. Another great thing about WordPress is that you barely need any add-ons to make it work really well, but some can save you a lot of hassle, such as the Cookies for Comments widget that gets rid of spam bots straight away.
Content of the blog
Matt warns of the danger of BO (back-link obsessing). When you think it’s all about quantity, not quality, you run into trouble. In order for the WordPress SEO to be improved, you need links to your site to meet two criteria: they must be reputable and relevant. If you just get backlinks from your mates’ poorly ranked blogs, then it won’t make much difference to anything. Having important and well-known sites linking to your blog is much more effective. But you also need the links to be on sites or in blog posts that are relevant to the content of your blog. Like Matt says, “You wanna be on topic and reputable.”
SEO wisdom
Another piece of sage advice Matt gives is that you should always write about things you actually care about. People can tell if you’re just copy-pasting some news piece with a brief and disinterested introduction in front of it. Life’s too short to write about stuff you’re not interested in. Take a look at the video for more nuggets of SEO wisdom.
