Matt Cutts, senior software engineer of Google gave a one hour talk on Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers during the Wordpress Camp 2007 happened 2 weeks ago in San Francisco. Thanks to onemansblog, those who are unable to attend the WordCamp now get to view the lecture in video.

Topics covered by Matt during the talk includes Wordpress plugins recommendations, SEO keyword tips, migrating to new webhost, advantages and usage of Google Analytics and Google Webmasters, SEO security tips, and more. Spend one hour watching this video this weekend (or at least download the Powerpoint Slide), I promised you will be inspired. Video after jump.

10 most common SEO mistakes

Bad Titles

Titles are the most important thing about a webpage. Search engine spiders see the title on your page first and they make a general assessment about it based upon this. They scan the page and make sure the content of the page matches the title and then assign rankings based upon these matches and how they best fit. The title tag is the best way to inform the search engine what your page is about, and it plays an important part in ranking if used properly. Placing your main identified keywords in the title and ensuring to obey the rule of leftward and stemming is vital – leftward rule, the closer the word to the left of the sentence the more important it is; stemming is where words can be associated but with words in-between i.e.: Great Blue Widgets when stemmed would allow Great Widgets. It is important to ensure your title matches your page content, description and Meta keywords and is unique for your website. Every page title and content should be unique otherwise it will be ranked supplemental.

Filename of the Page

It is important if you are using dynamic websites like Joomla or other content management systems that a search engine friendly URL translator is installed. Because I use Joomla every day I will describe what I mean relating to Joomla. In Joomla (and most other dynamic websites) URL’s like the normal Joomla URL “index.php?option=com_mtree&task=listcats&cat_id=1766&Itemid=35″ drive the website. The problem with these URL’s is that they are unintelligible by humans and also by search engines. Installing a search engine friendly URL component will change these pages to something more meaningful and also including your keywords in these page names can help with SEO. The newly transformed search engine friendly URL would look like this “buy-blue-widgets.html”. If you do not have a dynamic website, then ensure your page name is short, to the point and contains your main keywords for that page maybe with a call to action like “buy” and “blue widgets”.

Duplicate or Bad Content

Ensuring your content is unique and relevant is vital in SEO success. Often websites just duplicate content or bring in plagiarized content from other websites. It is my experience that these websites fail dismally in search engine rankings. Write some decent and unique content or maybe search online and find someone who can actually write you decent unique content for a fee. Make it good, friendly and unique content that people will want to link to. If you are listed in the supplemental index of Google, then making sure your titles, descriptions, Meta keywords and on page content is unique, is the only way to drag them out of the supplemental index.

No Links

Having covered off a few of the on page most important SEO tips we now look at links, which are an off page SEO concept. For each person or website that links to your website it is a vote for your site. If the website that links to yours has a high pagerank itself then it carries more weíght. Simply having good keywords, titles and text on your page is only part of SEO. Just because you created a unique and perfectly optimized webpage does not mean you will automatically gain a decent pagerank for that page. In order to ensure SEO success you have to create incoming links – this is probably the hardest part of search engine optimization because you are effectively selling your pages all over the Internet. One way to gain ínstant (within a few weeks) links is to pay for text advertising – A search on Google will uncover some of the best text linking services. Link exchanges are bad because for every vote you get you are giving one away and, if you happen to link to a “black listed” site, then Google will penalize you significantly. One way links are the ultimate in SEO link campaigns so seek out directories (either paid or free, you need to evaluate), post in forums, write articles and submit them and ask other friendly webmasters if they can help you out with a link. The best way to gain links is to have unique content that other people actually want to link to.

Incoming Link Anchor Text

Having pointed out how important it is to gain incoming links, it is now important to also point out that the text those links are anchored to is important also. The text should be targeted at your main keywords and the page they point to should have those keywords as relevant and prominent also. The website you link from should be relevant to your website. So, as an example I own a web design company in Melbourne, Australia so I gain links from web hostíng providers and/or open source Joomla sites in or around my region. Getting 1000 links from a casino related website will serve no benefit to my website and will not make it rank higher for “web design” keyword search terms. Use professional common sense when gaining links.

Bad Internal Page Links

We return to on page factors that you can work on within your website. It is important to make sure that the anchor text linking to pages within your own website is relevant to the target page. Make sure the title tag is filled in also for each link. You have the greatest control over links from within your own web site so make sure they are relevant and that the link title and the on page copy match the main keywords of the target page.

Live Links

Using some external tools like the link checker that W3 Org offers is good. I suggest harnessing as many tools as you can to ensure all of the links on your website are live, working and not sending people to 404 error pages. It is also important to ensure your page markup (html, xhtml) is valid. W3 also provides a tool for this. Make use of both of these freely available tools.

Impatience

Search Engine Optimization is not a short term task. It is one of an ongoing refinement after refinement and hour after hour of working on your website. Producing unique content, checking it, validating, listing and checking the search engines and making sure they have it listed correctly. Do not think for one second that you can optimize your site thoroughly ever and do not ever think that just because you are number one for a search term that it will indefinitely stay that way. Search Engine Companies are always changing their ranking and rating systems and coupled with this there are always other people out there gunning for your top spot. Keep looking to improve and learn more and don’t sit back and wait for others to take your top spot. Be proactive, seek out new content, links and keep ahead of the curve.

Keyword Spamming and Stuffing

If you sell “Blue Widgets”, then every page of your site does not need to have “Blue Widgets” in the title, description and Meta tags. Try and be objective and analyze your website. Focus pages on a specific group of keywords you have identified from the keyword líst. Sometimes finding niche markets locally first can be best. So, as an example, “Buy Blue Widgets Australia” or “Buy Blue Widgets Melbourne”. These would be examples of good second or even third tier search keyword phrases, but you can make some good salës with these niche terms because the searcher is targeting buying these items.

If you are aiming for traffics from Google, the last thing you want to end up is having duplicates of a same content being indexed by Google. They will eventually being treated as supplemental. Feeds is one of the content you don’t want to get indexed as they are duplicates of your original contents. Here’s few ways to remove feeds from getting indexed drawn after a little discussion with Ashish.

Add nofollow to Feed Button

Check your feed button, make sure it comes with a rel="nofollow" within the hyerlink codes.

Add nofollow to Comment Feeds and Trackbacks

If you provide feeds and trackback for single post, you should add rel="nofollow" to them too. Adding these codes varies from themes to themes, but big chance you might find them inside comments.php.

Activate NoIndex in Feedburner

If you are using Feedburner, head over to Publicize -> NoIndex and check on Indicate that your feed should not be indexed by search engines.

Add Disallow /feed in robots.txt

Add these following into your robots.txt to suggest feed related contents should not be crawled.

Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /*/feed/
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/

This should stop bots from indexing all contents related to feeds.

1. Check Search Engine Crawl Error Pages

It’s important to monitor search engine crawl errors reports to keep on top of how your site and its pages are performing. Monitoring error reports can help you determine when and where Googlebot or another crawler is having trouble indexing your content – which can help you find a solution to the problem.

2. Create/update robots.txt and sitemap files

These files are supported by major search engines and are incredibly useful tools for ensuring that crawlers index your important site content while avoiding those sections/files that you deem to be either unimportant or cause problems in the crawl process. In many cases we’ve seen the proper use of these files make all the difference between a total crawl failure for a site and a full index of content pages which makes them crucial from an SEO standpoint.

3. Check Googlebot activity reports

These reports allow you to monitor how long it’s taking Googlebot to access your pages. This information can be very important if you are worried that you may be on a slow network or experiencing web server problems. If it is taking search engine crawlers a long time to index your pages it may be the case that there are times when they “time out”and stop trying. Additionally, if the crawlers are unable to call your pages up quickly there is a good chance users are experiencing the same lag in load times, and we all know how impatient internet users can be.

4. Check how your site looks to browsers without image and JavaScript support

One of the best ways to determine just what your site looks like to a search engine crawler is to view your pages in a browser with image and JavaScript support disabled. Mozilla’s Firefox browser has a plug-in available called the “Web Developer Toolbar” that adds this functionality and a lot more to the popular standards-compliant browser. If after turning off image and JavaScript support you aren’t able to make sense of your pages at all it is a good sign that your site is not well-optimized for search. While images and JavaScript can add a lot to the user experience they should always be viewed as a “luxury” – or simply an improvement upon an already-solid textual content base.

5. Ensure that all navigation is in HTML, not images

One of the most common mistakes in web design is to use images for site navigation. While for some companies and webmasters SEO is not a concern and therefore they can get away with this for anyone worried about having well-optimized pages this should be the first thing to go. Not only will it render your site navigation basically valueless for search engine crawlers, but within reason very similar effects can usually be achieved with CSS roll-overs that maintain the aesthetic impact while still providing valuable and relevant link text to search engines.

6. Check that all images include ALT text

Failing to include descriptive ALT text with images is to miss out on another place to optimize your pages. Not only is this important for accessibility for vision-impaired users, but search engines simply can’t “take a look” at your images and decipher the content there. They can only see your ALT text, if you’ve provided it, and the associates they’ll make with the image and your relevant content will be based exclusively on this attribute.

7. Use Flash content sparingly

Several years ago Flash hit the scene and spread like wild fire. It was neat looking, quick to download and brought interactivity and animation on the web to a new height. However, from an SEO standpoint Flash files might as well be spacer GIFs – they’re empty. Search engines are not able to index text/content within a Flash file. For this reason, while Flash can do a lot for presentation, from an accessibility and SEO standpoint it should be used very sparingly and only on non-crucial content.

8. Ensure that each page has a unique < title > and meta description tag

Optimization of < title > tags is one of the most important on-page SEO points. Many webmasters are apparently unaware and use either duplicate < title > tags for multiple pages or do not target search traffic at all within this valuable tag. Run a search on a competitive keyword of your choice on Google – click on the first few links that show up and see what text appears in the title bar for the window. You should see right away that this is a key place to include target keywords for your pages.

9. Make sure that important page elements are HTML

The simple fact to keep in mind when optimizing a page is that the crawlers are basically only looking at your source code. Anything you’ve put together in a Flash movie, an image or any other multimedia component is likely to be invisible to search engines. With that in mind it should be clear that the most important elements of your page, where the heart of your content will lie, should be presented in clean, standards-compliant and optimized HTML source code.

10. Be sure to target keywords in your page content

Some webmasters publish their pages in hopes that they will rank well for competitive keywords within their topic or niche. However, this will simply never happen unless you include your target keywords in the page content. This means creating well-optimized content that mentions these keywords frequently without triggering spam filters. Any way you cut it you’re going to need to do some writing – if you don’t like doing it yourself it’s a good idea to hire a professional copy writer. Simply put: without relevant content that mentions your target keywords you will not rank well.

11. Don’t use frames

There is still some debate as to whether frames are absolutely horrible for SEO or whether they are simply just not the best choice. Is there really a difference? Either way, you probably don’t want to use frames. Crawlers can have trouble getting through to your content and effectively indexing individual pages, for one thing. For another, most functionalities that the use of frames allows is easily duplicated using proper CSS coding. There is still some use for a frames-based layout, but it is still better to avoid it if at all possible.

12. Make sure that your server is returning a 404 error code for unfound pages

We’ve all seen it. We’re browsing around at a new or familiar site, clicking links and reading content, when we get the infamous blank screen that reads “404 page not found” error. While broken links that point to these pages should definitely be avoided you also don’t want to create a “custom error page” to replace this page. Why? Well, it’s simple: if you generate a custom error page crawlers can spend time following broken links that they won’t know are broken. A 404 error page is easily recognizable, and search engine crawlers are programmed to stop following links that generate this page. If crawlers end up in a section of your site that is down through an old link that you missed they might not spend the time to index the rest of your site.

13. Ensure that crawlers will not fall into infinite loops

Many webmasters see fit to include scripting languages, such as PERL, PHP and ASP to add interactive functionality to their web pages. Whether for a calendar system, a forum, eCommerce functionality for an online store, etc. scripting is used quite frequently on the internet. However, what some webmasters don’t realize is that unless they use robots.txt files or take other preventative measures search engine crawlers can fall into what are called “infinite loops” in their pages. Imagine, if you will, a script that allows a webmaster to add a calendar to one of his pages. Now, any programmer worth his salt would base this script on calculations – it would auto-generate each page based on the previous month and a formula to determine how the days and dates would fall. That script, depending on sophistication, could plausibly extend infinitely into the past or future. Now think of the way a crawler works – it follows links, indexes what it finds, and follows more links. What’s to stop a crawler from clicking “next month” in a calendar script an infinite number of times? Nothing – well, almost nothing. Crawlers are well-built programs that need to run efficiently. As such they are built to recognize when they’ve run into an “infinite loop” situation like this, and they will simply stop indexing pages at a site that is flagged for this error.

www and Non-www

Most of us would think they are the same, thus assuming

• www.domain.com, and
• domain.com

are the same. Actually they are not. In search engine point of view, they are treated differently. Its’s up to the webserver. www and non-www can return totally different websites. Here is an example, www.phpicalendar.com and phpicalendar.com, both return different website.

Even if www and non-www return the same website, that still doesn’t mean its safe or good enough. When

• www.domain.com/blog/seo-tips/
• domain.com/blog/seo-tips/

returns the same result in Google index, they will not like it. Very high chance that the content will be placed under Supplemental Index.

Supplemental Index

Definition of Wikipedia says "Supplemental Result is a supplementary Google search Index of less important web pages according to the Google’s PageRank". Here’s how a supplemental result looks like:

Supplemental results do not cause a Google penalty but because they are treated as less important, they will lose their PageRanks.

301 Redirect

Your site is index by Google robots that crawls your site frequently. These robots will treat www and non-www differently, and if both have the same content, it will be treated as duplicates. 301 Redirect is one of the most commonly used method to solve this.

Under your web folder public_html/ look for a filename call .htaccess. If there is no such file, you will need to create one. Open up and insert the following script:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

This will force all visits, including robots to take the www.domain.com even if they access your site through domain.com. A good way to find out if its working is to type the domain without www on the browser url bar, hit enter and see if it changes to http://www.domain.com when the website loads up.

Here’s another good entry from Smashing Magazine that teaches you everything you ever wanted to know on Google PageRank. It covers the algorithm of how PageRank works, its impact on your site, factors to getting good PageRank, PageRank tools & services and much more. Almost all ad networks are taking Google PageRank into consideration determining value of one’s website. It is worth taking some time going through it.

Don’t just asked, let’s Learn Google Page Rank

Top 10 Positive Factors

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

Most Controversial Factors

1. Manual Authority/Weight Given to Site by Google
2. Relevance of Site’s Primary Subject Matter to Query
3. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
4. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
5. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
6. Quality of the Document Content (as measured algorithmically)
7. Domain Extension of Linking Site (edu, gov, com, ca, co.uk, etc)
8. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
9. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
10. TLD Extension of Site (edu, gov, us, ca, com, etc)

Top 5 Negetive Factors

1. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
4. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
5. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links

via seomoz

“Look! If you type “XXX”, “XXX” in Google search box, I’m first on the result :)“

This actually shows us how importantly we took Google Indexes. Here’s a good checklist I stumbled across from a forum and you should really perform a checklist like this before submitting your site to Google, preferably any search engines. Checklist after jump. Credit goes to techfrenzy.net

Google Submit Checklist

If you have a splash page on your website, make sure you have a text link that allows you to pass it.

I’ve seen many websites with a fancy flash introduction on the index and no other way to navigate around it. Well, Google can’t read into your flash page, and therefore it cannot bypass it. All you have to do is put a text link to your website’s second index, and the deed is done.

Make sure you have no broken links

I know this is kind of obvious, but you’ll be surprised to find out how many errors is the Google crawler experiencing daily due broken links. Therefore, you’d better check and double check every internal link of your webpage before submission. Don’t forget that your links are also your visitor’s paths to your content. It’s not all about Google, you know

Check the TITLE tags

Since you are able to search in title tags on Google and since the title tags is displayed in the top of your browser window, I’d say this is an important aspect you need to check. This doesn’t mean you have to compile a >20 keywords list there. Instead, make it a readable sentence since it’s viewable by both crawlers and surfers.

Check the META tags

Rumors about Google not caring about META tags are not 100% correct. Google relies on these tags to describe a site when there’s a lot of navigation code that wouldn’t make sense to a human searcher, so why not make sure you’re all in order and set up some valid KEYWORDS and a valid DESCRIPTION. You never know.

Check your ALT tags

The ALT tags are probably the most neglected aspect of a website since no one bothers to put them in order. It’s definitely a plus if you do, so Google spider can get a clue about all of your graphics. However, don’t go extreme and start explaining in an ALT tag that a list bullet is a list bullet.

Check your frames

If you use frames on your website, you might not be indexed 100%. Google actually recommends that you read an article of Danny Sullivan on Search Engines and Frames. You have to make sure that either Google can read from your frames, either that it has an alternative, defined via the NOFRAMES tag.

Do you have dynamically generated pages?

I know the web evolved so much in the last period of time, and more and more websites based on dynamic scripting languages (PHP, ASP, etc) are coming out every second, but Google said they are limiting the amount of dynamic webpages they’re indexing. It’s not too late to consider a compromise and include some static content in your pages. It helps.

Update your content regularly

This is an important aspect that you should consider, since Google indexes more quickly pages that get updated on a regular basis. You will notice that the number of pages indexed by the search engine will increase day by day if you update, but will stagnate or decrease if you don’t bring something new. I suggest setting up a META option in the header that will tell Google how frequently should it come back for a reindexing.

The robots.txt

This file is a powerful resource if used properly. You have the chance to filter out the bots that crawl your website, and you have the chance of restricting access to certain URL’s that should not be indexed (login pages, admin backends, etc).

To cache or not to cache?

Google caches some webpages for quick access, but some webmasters do not like that. The procedure is quite simple. All you have to do is write a line of code between your HEAD tags.

META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE" – should be enough to stop all robots from caching and archiving the page where the code is embedded.

SEO Inc has just released their latest SEO tool bar version 2.0. This tool bar has almost everything you need to do search engine optimization for your website. SEO tool bar has more than 12,000 downloads after its release. The tool bar contains no spy ware or any application that with personal information collecting capability, therefore you can be quite self-assured that this software is safe to be use/installed.

Let’s take a look into some few good functions of SEO Inc. Tool bar v2.0

Web Searching

SEO Tool bar starts with a search bar. Type in your keywords or terms and search from the drop down option of 11 most famous search engines, inclusive of Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Alstavista, Teoma, Hotbot, Alexa, Dmoz, Google and Yahoo Directory. This makes my searching and result comparing so much easier now. The magnifying glass icon beside the search engine indicates which search engine you are currently highlighting.

Check site ranking

Wherever page you are on, click on Ranking and choose the options in the drop down. This gives you the particular page’s ranking from Google, MSN or Yahoo.

Keyword Density

Type a keyword in the search box; select Site Data -> Keyword density and it will show you (in percentage) the result of the occurrences of that particular keyword within the page.

HTML Validation

Validate current HTML page in just 1 click. This function uses W3C to validate the HTML.

Site Analyzing

Clicking on this will check your site with SEOInc and give you result on the following

1. Website uptime status
2. Web server information
3. Content encoding
4. Web page size
5. Web page loading time
6. Meta tags information
7. Keywords (Anchor, Imgs)
8. Total URLS on page
9. Density of keywords

Engine data

With the page you are on, click on Engine Data and choose the dropdown option. You will be display output the important information about that page, search engine dependent.

Checking MISC Data

Under Network Data, you can do the following

1. Convert current domain name to IP
2. Check website load time, with rankings
3. Ping Website
4. Check WHOIS data
5. Check response header

The tool bar is currently supporting IE, Firefox users will have to wait.

It gives you your

Google & Alexa Page Rank

How many $ your blog is worth

Popularity of your blog among top search engines

And for sure you can copy these codes and show off the stats at your website.

Check your page ranks now.