Matt Cutts on Wordpress SEO for Google

July 24th, 2007 by Loren Baker, Editor | 14 Comments

Matt Cutts made an appearance at the Wordpress Wordcamp on Saturday and discussed SEO for Wordpress blogs.

Here are some of the highlights:

Matt recommends the SEO Title Plugin to swap the name of the blog title with the name of the post titles.
Use Alt attributes while blogging and with photos.
Google does not care about the number of slashes in a URL (blog/title/date/#)…. [but Yahoo does]
File extensions in the URL won’t affect rankings (.php, .html, .htm, .asp, .aspx, .jsp), just don’t use .exe
Underscores in URLs are now (or at least very soon to be) treated as word separators by Google. ~~Beforehand, underscores and hyphens were not counted as such.~~ Now, the underscore AND the hyphen have the same word separator value.
If you want to get into Google News, secure multiple authors

Coverage of Matt’s presentation on SEO tips for bloggers:

Comments

14 responses so far ↓

Eric Lander on Jul 24, 2007 at 1:52 pm

Awesome information here Loren… Thanks so much for posting this!
Halfdeck on Jul 24, 2007 at 3:30 pm

“Beforehand, underscores and hyphens were not counted as such.”

Not true Loren.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-post-vanessa-fox-on-organic-site-review-session/

Vanessa Fox: “And speaking of putting a dash in URLs, hyphens are often better than underscores [Ed. Note: bolded by Matt]”

Posted april 21, 2006 (that’s over a year ago).

As far back as I can remember, Google has always treated hyphens as word separators.
Loren Baker, Editor on Jul 24, 2007 at 5:41 pm

I’ll rewrite that, what I meant was that before they were not treated as the same (hence the ‘and’) but now they are.
Matt Mcfalling on Jul 24, 2007 at 7:14 pm

Hey Loren,

Great information. I really enjoy following Matt Cutts, and this was some really quality information!

Thanks for your time,

Matt Mcfalling
Nathania - Guest-Blogger.com on Jul 24, 2007 at 9:06 pm

At the risk of sounding spammy, would Google News be able to distinguish a site that has multiple authors from a site that has regular guest bloggers?

In other words, how do they determine a group blog from an individual blog?

Thanks. :)
CarstenCumbrowski on Jul 24, 2007 at 9:47 pm

Halfdeck: “As far back as I can remember, Google has always treated hyphens as word separators.”

At least till early 2002. That was when I discovered it for one of my sites :)
free iphone on Jul 24, 2007 at 11:14 pm

Good tips. Thanks Matt
Wayne Smallman on Jul 25, 2007 at 6:22 am

What I find deliciously ironic (moronic? But not on Matt’s part, I hasten to add), amusing and wildly annoying is Matt suggesting people use the: “SEO Title Plugin to swap the name of the blog title with the name of the post titles” when Google Blogger doesn’t let you do that…
Loren Baker, Editor on Jul 25, 2007 at 6:47 am

Wayne, I guess that’s one reason Matt may prefer Wordpress over Blogger, perhaps one of the many reasons.
Wayne Smallman on Jul 25, 2007 at 7:08 am

Hi Loran, it’s a shame because when compared to Google’s other applications, Blogger lags somewhat.

And even more so when compared to WordPress…
James on Jul 25, 2007 at 10:37 am

In the past Matt Cutts has said dashes are better to use than underscores in the URL title(s). But if you study the SERPs you’ll notice Google really doesn’t discriminate against underscores at all, they view both hyphens and underscores simply as word separators.
Wayne Smallman on Jul 25, 2007 at 10:52 am

As well as catering to the search engines, it’s worth being mindful of the searcher, too.

In the past, I’ve always used hyphens (because the message has been to use them and not underscores) but I think underscores are more readable…
John Clinebell on Jul 25, 2007 at 11:50 am

It’s nice and kinda rare when what you hear from people at the top (about what the best practices are) is exactly what you’re doing. Well, in this case, the only thing we don’t currently have on our site is multiple authors.. the one thing I’d like to know is how could Google tell if you set up legit multiple authors, or if you just set up a bunch of author accounts on your blog and post using different ones? Seems there might be potential abuse of that? Anyone got ideas as to what they might be doing there to prevent it?
Kenichi Suzuki on Jul 25, 2007 at 11:43 pm

Hi Loren,

Great article though short!

I’ve already “the SEO Title Plugin” since I read an ariticle written about that on SE Journal.

I have a quetion.

[but Yahoo does]

You mean the fewer slashes are, the higher your rank is on Yahoo?

If so, would you tell me where I can get more infomation on that.

I’m a Japanese webmaster living in Japan.
Yahoo! is the most popular search engine, not Google in Japan.
So, I’m interested in Y!, too.

Thank you.