Matt Cutts, use your keywords.. often
Google are usually pretty coy and vague when they talk about keyword specifics. You may remember last year I did a post and video on Michael Jones of Google and how he basically said don’t worry about your keywords. Earlier this year Google hinted at this again in the SEO Cheat Sheet where they said be “descriptive” with your filenames, headings and URLs. They forgot to tell you to use your keywords in these descriptions. Well Matt Cutts just released a video where he talks about being VERY specific about your keywords. I’ll drop it in at the end of this post. As much as Google has got better about understanding the relationships between words by looking at their context, you still need to have the keywords you want to rank for on the page. A simple concept right? You would think so but I have been talking about keyword research for a long time and I’m constantly surprised by businesses who don’t want the keywords they want to rank for on their page.
Press Releases.. really?
Mat also said, as did Michael last year, that press releases are a good way to expose users to your content. I guess they mean backlinks. Some of the press releases from SEO companies I see though are disastrously spun nonsensical twaddle. I sure hope Google is not rewarding rubbish content like this that I found in Google News.
Linguistic Gymnastics
Sometimes it can be difficult to work a phrase into an article so it sounds natural. For instance if I wanted to rank for “Advertising Company Melbourne” it’s kind of hard to make it sound natural. For services, people will often use a geographic qualifier to get more relevant results. Gone are the days where you would have an article that read like “So if you are looking for an Advertising company Melbourne..” although I am sure there are a few on this site scattered about over the last 8 years:) However you could say “We are the best advertising company Melbourne has to offer”. Slightly messes up the meaning of the search but you get the idea.
Blogging Yet?
In his video Matt also talked about using more content. For years a lot of us have been talking about publishing content as essential for SEO. That was one of the reasons I started doing these videos back in 2006 and published my first one to Youtube in 2007. Today this concept is called “Content Marketing” and we’re finding that sites are being rewarded more than ever now if they have a blog and update it regularly. In today’s video I take a look at a great opportunity that is coming up at the end of this month with Darren Rowse also known as Problogger. If you want to take the next step with your business into the world of blogging (and you should) you can’t go wrong with Darren and this masterclass he is doing as part of PESA. This man taught me a lot.
Proof of blogging & SEO
We created a report 12 months ago on power company websites and their ranking and then repeated it again this year. We found that all the companies that had added blogs in that time now ranked higher than they did last year. If I can work out how to remove the commercially sensitive data so it still makes sense I’ll publish some of the findings here.
Here is Matt’s video as promised.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
