15 Tips from Matt Cutts

Charles from Blogging Pro recently published a post covering the first day of the WordCamp 2007 conference. He is sharing his views on the event, including a description of the first keynotes. The most interesting part is his summary of the presentation delivered by Matt Cutts. Here are the 15 points that Matt covered:

1. Don’t put your blog at the root of your domain.


2. Name your directory ‘blog’ instead of ‘wordpress’.


3. In URLs, no spaces are worst, underscore are better, dashes or hyphens are best.


4. Use alt tags on images: not only is it good accessibility, it’s good SEO.


5. Include keywords naturally in your posts.


6. Make your post dates easy to find.


7. Check your blog on a cell phone.


8. Use partial-text feeds if you want more page views; use full-text feeds if you want more loyal readers.


9. Blogs should do standard pings.


10. Standardize backlinks (don’t mix www with non-www).


11. Use a permanent redirect (301) when moving to a new host.


12. Don’t include the post date in your URL.


13. When moving between hosts, wait until Googlebot and traffic begin to visit the new host before taking down the old one.


14. If using AdSense, use section targeting.


15. Use FeedBurner’s MyBrand feature to take control of your feeds (i.e., feed.domain.com instead of http://feeds.feedburner.com/domain).

I agree with most of the points, but not with all of them. First of all, I don’t think you should install Wordpress on a subdirectory unless you have clear plans to develop the root directory for other purposes (e.g., a business website).

Secondly, I don’t agree with using partial feeds for maximizing page views. Feedburner confirmed sometime ago that the click-through rate is very similar to partial and full feeds. Additionally, you might be limiting the potential of RSS subscribers on your blog by offering a partial feed.

You can find another coverage of his presentation on the post “Matt Cutts, Whitehat SEO Tips for Bloggers.”