I wrote this in February 2013. Search has changed a lot since then, so read it as a snapshot of SEO advice from that time, not as current advice.
My brother has always cared most about design. He would spend hours making something look better, whether it was a WordPress theme or a logo. If we were building a product, beating the competition to market didn’t interest him much. To him, looks mattered most.
So I was surprised when he sent me a link to a talk Matt Cutts gave at WordCamp San Francisco 2009 about ranking on Google with WordPress. I hadn’t seen it, and I wanted to know whether his tips still held up in the Panda and Penguin era.
Most of them do. The 46-minute talk works as a refresher course on SEO for WordPress.
Five takeaways from the talk
Here are five things I learned, or was reminded of, from watching it.
1. Vary the URL and the post title
I always thought a post had a better chance of ranking if its URL and title used exactly the same keywords. Not so, says Matt. He recommends varying them. For example, if your title is “How to rank number 1 on Google,” your URL could be /ranking-top-spot-google.
2. Make your permalinks SEO-friendly
WordPress’s default permalinks aren’t SEO-friendly (for example, metahead.com/?p=123), and I don’t know why WordPress hasn’t changed that. So remember to change them in Settings › Permalinks to something readable, like metahead.com/%postname%.
3. Don’t bold your keywords
When I started blogging, one school of SEO thought said you should bold your main keywords to tell search engines what a post is about, in the same spirit as using heading tags for titles. Matt says bolding your keywords a hundred times won’t help.
4. Focus on a niche
Matt’s advice is to start small and focus on one niche. When your pages stick to one topic and use related keywords, it’s easier for search engines to understand what your site is about.
His example was a gadget blog: don’t try to cover every gadget at once. Start with a smaller niche you can do well in, perhaps one with less competition, such as Android or BlackBerry phones. Once your blog is known for that, branch out gradually until it becomes an authority on gadgets.
5. Show related posts at the end of each post
Ever been caught in a YouTube loop, or spent hours on 9GAG because you kept finding one more funny post? Matt says you can do the same for your visitors by listing related posts at the end of each post. Plenty of WordPress plugins do this. On metahead.com, I was using YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin).
The tip above all the others
Those are the five most useful things I took from Matt’s 2009 talk that still held up in 2013. But above all of them is what I think is Google’s most ignored tip: put your visitors’ interests ahead of your own. Do that, and they’ll be happy, they’ll come back, and they might bring a friend or two.
Top photo: Freestocks.org / StockSnap (CC0).