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This is a very special edition of the SEO Tip of the Day. It is not everyday that you get an SEO Tip right from Google, but today we did get to hear from Matt Cutts from Google. Matt talked about two things that we would like to point out to you.

1. The importance of an XML sitemap. With a sitemap you are making Google's job of crawling your site much easier. If you want to get a deep crawl of your site then make sure you have a site map

2. Avoid Flash and Javascript menus. Eventhough Google is getting better at crawling Java and Flash menus, the easiest menus for them to crawl are the menus built with text links and styled using CSS. If you are using Flash, then you are just making the search engine work harder to crawl all their pages. 

I guess Matt's advice is -- Make Google's Job easy!

Enjoy the video and let us know what you think at http://www.youtube.com/wwwreachd 

Having Problem with the video? You can get the content the old fashioned way - Read the Video Transcript of Matt Cutts Interview

Transcript of Video with Matt Cutts

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Rodney Bartlett: Hi I am Rodney Bartlett with reached and we are in Pubcon in Vegas 2007. We just set in on Matt Cutts in the hot seat, so we are talking with Matt Cutts from Google. And I guess maybe if you wouldn’t mind for people who don’t know you, just introduce yourself tell us what you do?

Matt Cutts: Absolutely. My name is Matt Cutts I am the head of Webspam at Google. Webspam is a group within Google of search quality, so engine where we get complaints about searchers, we try to fix them and try to make sure they work better, we look at new algorithms. So, my specific job is when people try a cheat, we find ways to make that stop and make it work and scalable robust ways, but we get up in the morning and think about how can we deliver better search results everyday.

Rodney Bartlett: Cool. So, you talked last night a little bit about WordPress. You mentioned, if you using WordPress they are doing all the great stuff for you on your site for SEO. Could you tell us a little bit about some other things that WordPress does?

Matt Cutts: Totally. So, WordPress is the blogging software package, Webblog, so people who want to keep in online diary or talk about any topic that they want to, Wordpress is open source which is really nice feature, because you can download it for free, you can install it on your own server and then you can find the ton of plugins. Since it is open source people love to hack on it. The greatest thing is then latest version of WordPress that just came out recently is WordPress 2.3 and what that does is it pays attention to - sometimes if you write a blog you end up with the same blog post in 3 or 4 different places, P equals in a post number or permanent link here. WordPress 2.3 tries to take all of that and put all the post in one spot and what that means is they are doing all the work and for free you are getting software that made to do SEO pretty well.

Rodney Bartlett: So it is like deals with the duplicate content issue and...

Matt Cutts: As much as you can. There is always the case where you can say ok, here is the content for October and then here is the content for October 20th and so you can in theory still have an entry in different places, but it still much much better than it was before.

Rodney Bartlett: Cool, and one of the things that we hear a lot is and we try to teach people on our course is that content is king, provide relevant content to your users, don’t write for the search engines, but write for the people who are doing business with. So, that’s what we try to teach, what’s the next big - this is the other big SEO tip that you throw out there?

Matt Cutts: Excellent yeah, good question. So one of the things I would definitely recommend is, think about what users going to type. A lot of people, if you are a medical area you know what the right word is, but suppose you are going to target USB or pen drives, right. Some people are going to type “Flash Drive,” some people going to type “Pen Drive,” some people going to type “USB Drive” and you need to have all those words on the page, so that the search engine knows that’s what its about. So, I think that’s one really big think. Another thing is make sure that you offer some useful service. We had somebody that was doing a language translation site and they were wondering “why don’t I rank number one?” and I so checked out their site and it was literally just like broacher, like five pages contact us, about us, this is what we do and I looked at who the number one site was and the number one site was talking about Japanese to English translation and had a little many tutorials, “here is how you can write in Japanese. What is the difference between Katakana and Hiragana” and all these really need facts and so there was a compelling resource there. There was a reason why people would comeback toward and talk about it. It wasn’t just here is our company. Here is what we can do for you.

Rodney Bartlett: Thanks that would be good. So small business owners they are totally new to this, maybe they are not show what a title tag is or a meta tag, so all the stuff is overwhelming, what would advice be to kind of jump into this SEO Search Engine Optimization World?

Matt Cutts: Yeah. It can be confusing, it can a little scary, but don’t be scared. I mean the more time you spend on it, the better you get. I have seen that happen with AdWords. People who buy AdWords the first tag, they will make mistakes, that’s the natural thing, but the more time you put in on it, the better and better you get and it’s the exact same way with SEO. So for example, there is all these free resources out there, there is good forms where you can find out more information, you can also use Google Webmaster Central, which is at Google.com/webmasters and what you can do is, you can register to prove that you own a site and then we will give you all kind of stats, the queries you are showing up for, the clicks that people are doing, you can test out your robust on TXT, which is like a no tresspassing electronic sign and some people like accidentally forbid every search engine from visiting that site, and then they get angry and say “why didn’t you call and index me,” and so we have these sort of tools and checkers to help with that. Google has a lot of free resources. We have what known as the local business centre, where if you have a brick and motor business, suppose you are florist in your own, one corner of the hometown. You can tell us your address and show up for free in Google Local and Google Maps and that’s you don’t have to pay for inclusion, there is no recurring charge, that’s just helps us, because we can return better search results and it helps you with the small town business owner, because you can be found by people who are searching for your business.

Rodney Bartlett: Could you talk to us about that Google Maps thing, especially for the search results, so sometimes the map shows of that top with the top 3 and then there is the regular search results and how to those two roles mix, do they mix and all that?

Matt Cutts: Yeah. Sometimes you will see somebody do a search and you just know it is navigational, they are looking for Bob’s Florist in more head [Inaudible] or something like that and that’s where you really want like a business listing and hopefully a map would give you some context. Then if somebody just doing a search like “best florist", well then they weren’t necessarily looking for somebody who had a business name of “Best Florist” or something like that. So, we have very algorithm, where we try to predict, are they looking for specific name of the business or they looking for a local business or maybe they don’t know the name or they just doing background researchers right now and people cannot change those algorithm that sort of Google’s purgative to three things if you are more relevant, but you can register make sure that you have your business name and your address on your webpage, all those things which really help.

Rodney Bartlett: Great cool, thanks. Just a question or two hear about the Webmaster tools that you mentioned, we try to encourage people to set that up in the sitemap especially, could you talk about the importance of the sitemap and what that does?

Matt Cutts: Yeah. So a sitemap can tell Google, “hey these are the URLs” that are important to me if even set a priority in your sitemap file, but most importantly when you are first starting out, you may not have a lot of links and so we might not call your site very deeply. So, if you having that sitemap, you at least telling Google, “hey I have got 20 pages and these are what the URL.” So now, it is not a guarantee, we don’t say if you give us these sitemaps, we promise with all these pages and you can immediately see where a bad guy would like make a thousands domains, and needs to submit sitemaps for each domain. So we cannot guarantee it, but we do try to say, “let us see how many pages we can get from this domain.” So, it absolutely cannot hurt your site to do, it can only help and hopefully help a more and more every time.

Rodney Bartlett: I know this is not your area, but Google Base, we work a lot with real estate agents and in Canada, Google Base doesn’t show on the search results, but in a mistake if it does, is there plans for any change there or do you know?

Matt Cutts: That’s a good question. We always look as what’s good for the users, so if we didn’t have enough data, for Canada or we didn’t have enough feeds that relevant to Canada, then we might not be as likely to show it, but overtime I would hope that more and more people are using Google Base, because that’s in other free tool, where you can submit data and sometimes it will show up. So, I think personally it would be really nice as far as what exactly the future holds, even I don’t know, so.

Rodney Bartlett: Great, just a question hear about video. So we are in kind of new video world.

Matt Cutts: Yeah. You do it very well.

Rodney Bartlett: Gets some good youth, yeah, it is fun. We had a good time last night, you guys as party running around videoing everybody, but anyway indexing video, shall we post video on YouTube, shall we post it on Google Video, where should it go and how do you make sure that it gets found I guess...

Matt Cutts: Yeah, totally so here is few tips. If it’s less than 10 minutes YouTube you can put it up, no problem at all. If its more than 10 minutes, if it’s like an hour along interview, Google Video you can do longer forum video. If you can, it really makes a big difference, if you can get a transcript and I have even seen some people who paste the video will ship of the file, you can ship it to India or something like that, you can say all pay 2 cents per word or whatever and they transcriber for you, because search engine still have a problem indexing spoken stuff and things in video/audio stuff like that. So, if you have a transcript or you can do good Meta Tags or think about what people are going to type, so video SEO, Matt Cutts interview, Webmaster World and then put that into the description and make sure that there is some meta tags or some tags there, because we do search over those than the video search.

Rodney Bartlett: Ok, cool. I guess one last question about indexing and when we teach people we try to talk to them about in your navigation, having maybe CSS or using bulleted list, so that your navigation said is really callable, as suppose to flash or JavaScript, could you comment on that?

Matt Cutts: Yeah, absolutely in general well, if you take like an old, old vision of Netscape. Like Netscape for or there is even text browsers, so like links is a good one and you look at your website in that, that’s almost what your website looks like to buy, and so if you have got flash or if you got JavaScript, it can be kind of hard to interpret all of that and define the links. I personally I am a little buyers, because I work at Google, but personally I think Google does a very good job of pulling those links that are JavaScript in stuff, but you got to think about every search engine, because what it five years from now Giga Blast or Xlead or Turbo10 are all these other search engines are popular and every search engine has to do extra work, to be able to crawl that JavaScript, crawl that flash, so the easier you can make it for any search engine the more simple, that just makes that much more likely that you will be pulled. So, the advice that we give is, if you got a page have flash as a decoration, you can have lots of good flash that interesting but have the navigation be an HTML and that way the bots can crawl everywhere.

Rodney Bartlett: Cool.

Matt Cutts: Good to you.

Rodney Bartlett: Great.

Matt Cutts: Yeah. 

Rodney Bartlett: Thanks a lot of your time, yes.

Matt Cutts: There is a lot of fun...

Rodney Bartlett: Good to me...

Matt Cutts: Thank you very much.