Improve Your Blogs Search Rank - 5 Questions Answered By Google Employee Matt Cutts

Regular readers may remember a post in which we looked at an interview with Google Employee Matt Cutts.In that post i looked at the 5 tips Matt had to help your blog get crawled by Google, indexed by Google, and rank higher in Google search results.I added the tutorials needed to implement those tips on your blog in that post and if you missed it you can find it here : Getting Your Blog Ranked - With Google Employee Matt Cutts


Matt often does a Q&A were bloggers and webmasters post questions which Matt responds to in short videos.Some of these videos can be a great help when it comes to getting your Blogger blog ranked higher in Google search results.As the questions and answers in the Q&A are not specific to Blogger it can be hard to see exactly how you can use this information on your blog.

For that reason i have added 5 of the videos in this post and i will explain how you can use the answers to help your blog be more "Search Engine Friendly" and climb the rankings on Google search results.

At the bottom of this post i will give you the link to the official Google SE.O. Starter Pack a Free Ebook available in 40 languages.



Matt Cutts

You may be thinking who is Matt Cutts and why do i put so much faith into what he says.For me Matt knows what Bloggers and webmasters are looking for and always makes himself available to provide help.He knows how Google search works inside out and is willing to share his opinions.

Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues.He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam.Cutts also advises the public on how to get better website visibility in Google.
(Source: Wikipedia)


5 Videos To Help Your Blog In Search

Here are the videos and below each video i will explain what information you can use from the video to improve Your Blog Google Search Rank.





1. Should I Change My Titles And Description - This first video is on title and description and more specifically about meta title and description.

You can easily add a meta title and description to your Blogger Blog.

The snippet Matt mentions is the line of text that appears below your blog title in search engine results.

So currently the meta description i added for Spice Up Your Blog is this :

And if you search for 'Spice Up Your Blog' on Google this is the snippet displayed :

So instead of Google crawling my blog and picking words or phrases they think should be used as the snippet i have took control and told them what i want used.

I choose that description because i believe it will be catchy and make more people click my blog in the results rather than others.




2. Should I Use Hyphens Or Underscores In My Titles - Matt answers a question on the use of underscores verses hyphens in your titles.

What are underscores and hyphens ?

This is a hyphen : -
This is an underscore: _

So if i wrote a post and wanted to break up the title how should i do that.
A perfect example was a post i recently wrote on Info Barrel .

This is the post i wrote :

"Making Money From Climate Change How Green Is The New Black"

I felt the title would make more of an impact if it was broken into two sections so i added a hyphen :

Making Money From Climate Change - How Green Is The New Block

I could have used an Underscore :

Making Money From Climate Change_How Green Is The New Block

What Matt tells use here is first using hyphens in our titles is fine, but try to use hyphens and not underscores.




3. What S.E.O. Agency Should I Use -This is a short video about the use of S.E.O. (Search engine optimisation) agency's.

A seo agency is basically an agency you pay to help improve your blogs Search ranking.I guess the reason for adding this video is because you see so many ads with titles like :

"Guaranteed Number 1 On Google"

You may see these and think about paying for the service but you need to be very careful.

Matt kind of dodges the question, as a Google employee he cant really promote a outside product but he does give some guidelines.






4. What is more important content or links - I added this video because it is something i covered recently.

In a recent post i covered How Do-Follow works, The post looked in dept at how back links help your blog get ranked on Google, how to get backlinks to your blog and the main topic was Do-Follow comment sections on blogs.

I showed how to make your blog Do-Follow and how to use comments on other Do-Follow blogs to increase your blogs google rank.

In that post and in every post i have on Search engine optimisation i always finish by saying yes use these tip to help your blogs S.E.O. but 'Content is king' and posting constant good unique content will do more for your blog than anything else and Matt agrees.






5. Why do Google crawl/index Blogs quicker than other sites - I'm sure a lot of new Bloggers will see this title and laugh.I know i get contacted a lot about blogs especially new blogs not being indexed, crawled or updated by Google.

You Will notice a part of the question refers to "Wordpress ping".

I have meaning to write a post on using a ping services to send your blogs to search engines, blog directory's and bookmark sites.

In fact the reason i hadn't covered it was i was trying to build a ping service into Spice Up Your Blog.There are plenty of Ping services available and you should use them every time you update your blog.

Matt mentions 'Feedburner Ping' in the video.Every time you write a new post or update your blog head over to the Feedburner ping service and send out a ping :

feedburner Ping Service

Another ping service i use is Pingomatic you can also get pingomatic to ping your updated blog :

Pingomatic Ping Service

Remember you can get all these tips sent directly to your email and stay a step ahead.Its a quick and easy service Provided for Free by Google.Just fill in the Email form below the post.
If you need extra help on this or any tutorial just leave a comment, I love comments and feedback so this Blog is Do-Follow - when you comment here it helps Your Blogs Google rank !

I was originally going to add more videos in this post but i decided on quality ahead of quantity.As the questions Matt answers are not specific to Blogger i wanted to take the time to explain how you can use the answers to improve you blogger.

I will try to get another post on the subject soon and look at some more video Q&A sessions.

For now you can take a quick look at some other videos and help from Matt :

You can find Matt on his own Blog : www.mattcutts.com/blog/

And on Twitter : http://twitter.com/mattcutts

You Can look through the Google Webmaster Tools channel on Youtube

I have plenty more posts to Help Your Blog In Search Engines check them out.

And as promised here is the link to the Official Google S.E.O. Starter Pack Ebook

I think that about enough links to keep you busy for a while.


If you have any problems help is just a comment away.


Have you learned anything new from the videos ?