Sound Advice from Google’s Matt Cutts

A great article recently on USATODAY gives and insight into improving natural search rankings in Google. Matt Cutts provides the insight and invaluable tips on ethical, white hat techniques to improve your site’s ranking.

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You have a website and can’t figure out why it’s not showing up at the top of Google’s search rankings. You go to Google.com for some guidance but get lost trying to find answers.

Certainly, achieving visibility in Google’s search rankings can be a mystery. To help solve the riddle, USA TODAY sat down with Google’s Matt Cutts, an engineer and active blogger, who has five easy tips on how to “optimize” your site so Google and the rest of the world can find it.

More and more businesses are turning to the Web to find customers: $5.8 billion was spent on advertising in the first quarter alone, up 18.2% from the prior year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Google’s share of Internet searches continues to rise as well — to a record 61.8% in May, according to measurement service ComScore Media Metrix.

If you haven’t “optimized” your site, here’s how:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page.
“Think about what people are going to type in to try and find you,” Cutts says. He tells of meeting a chiropractor from San Diego who complained that his site couldn’t be found easily using Google search. The words “San Diego chiropractor” were listed nowhere on his site. “You have to make sure the keywords are on the page,” Cutts says. If you’re a San Diego doctor, Des Moines architect or Portland ad agency, best to let people know so immediately, at the top of your page.

2. Fill in your “tags.”
When creating websites, Internet coding language includes two key tags: title and description. Even if you don’t know code, which is used to create pages, software programs such as Adobe’s Dreamweaver have tools that let you fill them in in plain English (rather than “<title>San Diego Chiropractor</title”). Tags are crucial, Cutts says, because what’s shown in search results most often are the title and description tags.

If Cutts’ chiropractor had properly tagged his Web page, a search would have returned something like this: “San Diego chiropractor. Local doctor serves San Diego community. There’s also a third tag, to add keywords, or search terms, but Cutts says Google doesn’t put much weight in its rankings on that one.

3. Get other sites to “link” back to you.
Google says it looks at more than 100 pieces of data to determine a site’s ranking. But links are where it’s at, once your search terms are clearly visible on your site and the title and description tags correctly marked.

In a nutshell: Google ranks sites based on popularity. If authoritative sites link to you, you must be good, and therefore you get to the top of the list. If you can’t get top sites such as USATODAY.com or The New York Times to link to you, try your friends. And what if they don’t have a site? They probably do. Read on.

4. Create a blog and post often.
Cutts says blogging is a great way to add links and start a conversation with customers and friends. It will cost you only time: Google’s Blogger, WordPress and others offer free blogging tools. With a blog, you can link back to your site and offer links to others. It’s also a great way to start building content, Cutts says.

5. Register for free tools.
Google’s google.com/webmaster offers freebies to help get your site found. You can upload a text-based site map, which shows Google the pages of your site (create it at www.xml-sitemaps.com). Once that’s done, you’ll be registered with Google, where you can learn vital statistics — including who is linking to your site and how often Google “crawls” your site for updates.

Google’s Local Business center (google.com/local/add) is the place for business owners to submit a site so it shows up in local searches, with a map attached. Savvy consumers who use Google for searches know that the first 10 non-advertising results often are from Google Maps, so if you have a business and haven’t submitted it, you’re losing out on potential customers.

Don’t overdo it
When weaving keywords into a main page, Cutts says, some zealous Web publishers will use the term over and over again. That’s called “keyword stuffing.” It’s a big Google no-no that can have your site removed from the index.

“After you’ve said it two or three times, Google has a pretty good idea — ‘OK, this page has something to do with this keyword,’ ” he says. “Just think about the two or three phrases you want to be known for and weave that in naturally.

For blogger newbies, Cutts knows that writing (for example, posting new material) doesn’t always come easy. He suggests finding ideas by visiting social news sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon, to see what people are saying about your particular topic.

Aside from that, Cutts says, new material falls into the common-sense category: It’s all about your business. “If I’m a plumber in Iowa, I may want to write about some of the strange things that happen to me on the job, or the five most common ways to fix a toilet,” he says. “That kind of content can get really popular, and it’s a great way to get links.” Folks will post your piece on one of the social media sites. And with links comes higher Google rankings.

Finally, Cutts says, there is one big misconception about getting Google visibility that he wants to clear up: In order to be found at the top of Google’s rankings, you do not also have to advertise.

“One thing doesn’t have to do with the other,” he says.

ENDS

Google Webmaster Guidance on Paid Links

Following on from a couple of previous posts we have made on the subject of acquiring paid links, Betwixt reminds its blog readers of Google’s guidelines on buying links:

Google’s policy on paid links has long been the same: it does not approve of buying or selling links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings. Links that use the “nofollow” attribute or some sort of redirect to prevent the passing of PageRank are fine with them. Google employee Matt Cutts comments: 

“Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results. We enjoy working with webmasters, and an added benefit of our working together is that when you make better and more accessible content, the internet, as well as our index, improves. This in turn allows us to deliver more relevant search results to users.”

“If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines.”

Reporting a Paid Link
Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight.

Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.

Paid Links – Too Much, Too Soon

The article below illustrates the perils of trying to buy your way onto the first page of Google in a short space of time.

However, a quick note:
Whilst we don’t doubt the integrity of the Google index, there have been previous instances of big car insurance brands being turfed out of  first page Google results, only to be allowed back in, in a relatively short period of time.

Two cases of this are MoneySupermarket.com and Endsleigh – both companies were found out trying to (allegedly) cheat their way to the top of the Google rankings for the search term ‘Car Insurance’, using dubious or black hat SEO techniques. However, both websites are now back ranking very high (page 1) in the Google natural search results, for the ultra competitive search term car insurance.

Let’s all keep an eye on both GoCompare.com and Kwik Fit to see how quickly they rise back up to the top of the Google rankings for the search term ‘Car Insurance’?!

ARTICLE:
A couple of major UK brands in the insurance sector have recently been penalised by Google for boosting their rankings by buying paid reviews and paid links.

Last week, car insurance aggregator Gocompare.com was dropped from the number one slot for the term ‘car insurance’, and sent to the relative obscurity of page six of Google.

Its big mistake was to attempt to boost its search engine rankings by buying paid links and reviews, increasing the number of links into the site. This enabled the relatively new car insurance aggregator to reach the top of the natural search rankings.

The company achieved this in just over a year, which may well have raised alarm bells at Google, as such a rapid rise in the rankings is unusual, especially for such a competitive search term.

A similar penalty was imposed on Moneysupermarket.com last year, while the most recent victim of Google’s penalty has been Kwik Fit.

Kwik Fit is better known for tyres and brake pads than car insurance, but it has recently moved into the market, and was hovering between pages one and two of Google for the term ‘car insurance’ before being punished by Google for buying paid links.

Now Kwik Fit has moved down to page 5 on Google for the term, so it seems this strategy has not paid off for the company.

Google’s penalties can have a serious effect on web traffic – a recent Hitwise article showed that traffic to Gocompare.com from this search term had fallen by 87% in the weeks after the penalty.

It is likely that there are more brands using these SEO tactics, something which Google is keen to weed out, so we can expect more such penalties in the coming months.

Link Building Using Online Directories

Here is an interesting e-mail received recently into the offices of Betwixt. The correspondence came from a well known online business directory (identity removed).  

Hi Paul,

We are discontinuing the xxxx section of the xxxx.com Directory.

We do appreciate the support that we have received through the years, but after an extended period of struggling to develop a viable local and online business directory, it became apparent that the number of listings were not going to reach the point where the xxxx Directory could compete with other online business directories.

Added to that was the recent crack down on paid listings by the search engines. We were advised that continuing to host our directory of business listings could be viewed as providing e-commerce sites with a back door entry page and paid links.

Despite our arguments that the xxxx section provided a valid service to our uses and clients, the algos could not be engineered to see our point of view. To avoid problems with the search engines and preserve the health of the entire xxxx.com Directory, we made the decision to eliminate the offending section.

It was not an easy decision. We realize that many of our clients depend on these listing for a steady stream of convertible traffic. Shortly after we removed the copy referring visitors to the xxxx registration pages, our Yahoo! and Google referrals improved drastically, confirming our suspicion that hosting the xxxx pages was in fact hurting our overall performance.

We had many years of hard work and development and quite a bit of revenue invested in
the xxxx.com xxxx Directory. However, under the circumstances, we really had no choice.

We do offer direct advertising, which does not truly replace the benefits of the xxxx listings, but still allows commercial sites to be an integral part of the xxxx.com Directory. If you are interested placing a text ad in the main xxxx.com Directory, please visit xxxx for additional details.