MatCutts White Hat SEO Tips for Bloggers

Matcutts, popularly know as Google SEO Guy , recently gave presentation on White Hat SEO Tips for Bloggers.

This video is currently available on Viddler, and also in my blog Google SEO Guy Videos Section

The Summary of things Highlighted in the video " White Hat SEO Tips for Bloggers."

• Use variation of the same keyword in the url, title and content separately
• Use dashes and underscores in the URLs to separate the words
• Name categories after the keywords that you are chasing
• Avoid .biz and .info type of domains
• Make a buzz on the net and Google will notice you

Lastly he concluded "“Selling links and buying links are against our guidelines, and we do take action on them”.

The 5 Advantages of Blogging from an organizational perspective

First we had the internet, and then emails conquered the world with their speed and convenience. Now, a new form of interactivity has taken over the World Wide Web and it is called blogging.

In simple terms, a blog is any website where entries are written in a chronological order. Most blogs are the blogger’s personal comments on topics like food, fashion or sex. But there are other blogs which keep you updated on the latest happenings around the world as well.

Blogging has now emerged from a platform of interactivity to a superb marketing tool and most corporate use it to their advantage. But what are the advantages of blogging?

Advantages of blogging

• You can entice customers into personal conversations and thereby get feedback, criticism and personal comments at a rate that’s peanuts as compared to traditional forms of market research.

• You have both consumers as well as citizens who are visiting your blog. It is a great platform to keep them well informed and updated about the company and its products.

• You will create a stronger rapport with your customers and will increase the brand loyalty. It’s the human side of the organization that the customers will interact with over here.

• The reactions of the readers to certain pieces on your company will be really interesting and so can their suggestions.

•As the writer becomes popular, so will the organization. It portrays the organization as having talent.

Its opinion that counts

There was a time when public relations were all about what the organization wanted to say. That was all that we heard. But now, there has been an explosion of opinion and that’s what blogging is all about. It’s the latest and the truest form of democracy at work.

Google Page Rank Update - War on Link Selling Web Sites

Google has updated much awaited Page Rank (Green Bar Update). This Update has costed number of popular sites and blogs with their page ranks dropping.

Washingtonpost.com, Techcrunch, Engadget, and Forbes and other popular web directories are among the list of victims of recent google page rank update.

Link Baiting strategies in SEO

Of all the SEO strategies that have sprung up in the last few years, none have gained as much repute as link baiting. Link baiting is an exciting prospect and several different variations of this method have propped up recently.

Link baiting can be defined as the process of creating content that is interesting enough to catch people’s attention.

It can be informational stuff also known as informational hooks, news hooks which provide fresh news information each time and then garner citations and links.

‘Evil hooks’ which is the process of writing something that is mean about someone or some product is also known to gather a lot of attention.

Improving link quality

While people have commonly created bait articles, you can also provide a fresh information piece and then leave it on the internet as bait. There have been articles that have picked up almost 1000 links in as less as 6 months.

A news hook is the most effective one so far. So are contradictory hooks where you contradict someone else’s opinion.

Overall, it is an extremely effective way to build your brand online and to create a reputation.

Google Yet again proves to be leader in Search Market

In the recent survey conducted by hitwise and Net Ratings independently, google has proved that it is far ahead in its search market share than its other competitors.

As per Hitwise survey, Percentage of US Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers(in last four weeks till September 1, 2007. )

• Google - 63.98 %


• Yahoo! Search- 22.87 %


• MSN Search - 7.98 %


• Ask.com - 3.41 %

In another survey by netratings the search shares are as follows :

• Google - 53.6 %


• Yahoo Search - 19.9 %


• MSN/ Live Search - 12.9 %


• Ask .com Search - 1.7 %

Google Penalizing Paid Link Directories

Google has penalized around 60 paid link directories including Aviva, Alive, Big Web Links, ewebpages, Directory Dump, Elegant Directory, and Biz-Dir in violation of the search engine's quality guidelines.

Google is ecnouraging the web masters to report them about those involved both in buying and selling of links.

During a session at SES called "Are Paid Links Evil?" Cutts presented a slide presentation stating the types of paid links which google does not like.

Advantages of SEO marketing

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine marketing is the best form of marketing as opposed to E-mail, Bulk mail or telemarketing. In the case of the latter, the products are being ‘pushed’ to the customers, whereas in Search Engine marketing it is the customers who search for the products and is hence more effective.

Advantages of using SEO marketing:

• Better brand visibility


• Directly reaching your target audience making the products easily accessible to them.


• Is a round-the-clock service since its available 24/7 online, unlike tele-marketing or E-mail marketing which has a specific time period.


• Round the clock cross-browser compatibility enhancing increase in the sales of your products & services


• Since the results are keyword-based, the customers are genuine making it more profitable for the company.


• You can target a global market since it is available on the WWW

why is it important to perform search engine optimization for google??

It is well known fact that Google is leading search engine in USA. Recent statistics by www.webhits.de and www.hitswise.com, portray that Google is emerging as clear leader in Europe Search Market also.

Search Engine market shares in UK:

Google – 79.38%

Yahoo – 7.72%

Ask.com– 4.48%

Msn - 3.75%

Live– 1.53%

Search Engine market shares in France:

Google – 89.79%

Yahoo – 3.14%

Msn – 2.48%

Orange -1.89 %

Free– 0.72 %

Search Engine market shares in Germany:

Google – 88 %

Yahoo – 3.4 %

German ISP T-Online – 2.2 %

Msn -1.4 %

AOL – 1.3 %

The above stats give us picture of how important it is to do search engine optimization of site for google.

Google Launches Message Center for Web Masters

Google has launched message center in web masters console to facilitate personal and authenticated communication with web masters. Intially it will confined to messages related to search quality issues, and in long run may become communication channel for more types of information.

Message Center is capable of providing information in all almost all languages, including French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Traditional, Korean, Japanese, etc.

Google to Inrdouce new Meta Tag for web masters

Google plans to introduce new meta tag for webmasters which identifies pages that have a time limitation or are time bound.

The ‘unavailable_after’ meta tag will soon be recognized by Google according to Dan Crow, Director of Crawl Systems at Google and Jill Whalen of High Rankings.

Google is coming out with a new tag called “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it.