By Michael Dorausch, D.C.
This post is a combination of transcribed content from video recorded at a PubCon 2007 evening session that featured Matt Cutts, my organization of that content, and related resource links for websites or articles Matt spoke about during his presentation. The discussion was moderated by special guest host Guy Kawasaki, who was a keynote speaker at PubCon 2006.
(photo: Matt Cutts speaking at Thursday morning PubCon keynote presentation)
Matt Cutts: I’m sorry my mental gears are still making the shift, this is not your typical panel, I’m still kind of…
Guy Kawasaki: No it’s not, I’m not your typical moderator.
Matt Cutts: No you’re not. Um, OK. So here, here is Matts 3 step process to building up a really good site and getting a ton of traffic.
Step #1: Make a Compelling Service
If you’re trying to sell junk you’re going to have a much harder time. So spend the time, and the thing is you can start up a website really for a lot less money than you could even five or six years ago.
So, I think this has been a very useful theoretical discussion but let’s ground it a little bit, let’s take an actual specific example. Suppose you were going to start a site about, I don’t know, rumors about different companies, or something like that, OK?
Guy Kawasaki: (laughing) And you only have 12 grand.
Matt Cutts: And you only had 12 grand. First step is you make a compelling site, so imagine you’ve got that.
Step #2: Start a Blog
Seriously, blogs are one of the easiest ways to get links, engage in conversation, if people badmouth you on the web you can… defend yourself or badmouth them right back, depending on what your personality is like.
Step #3: Smart Marketing
Step number three is smart marketing and that can involve good SEO. If you do everything on WordPress you’re pretty much automatically covered as far as SEO, but you want to make sure things are crawlable. But the other aspect of marketing is having something interesting to say. So for example, valleywag, which is a Silicon Valley rumor sort of site, started out with a really juicy piece of gossip claiming that one person at a big company was dating another person at a big company. I’m not going to name them but they work at Google.
Um, and that helped propel that site up to a really big consciousness. So if I were doing, I don’t know, rumors about you know companies, or something like that, I would open it up to the public, but I would also try to do some investigating reporting, and get some really juicy tidbits or some really good scoops, because it’s not just controversy, it’s controversy backed by interesting facts.
And then I would think about broadening my scope a little bit. Start out with one or two companies that people are really interested in. Apple or Google or Yahoo or whoever. Dig down deep but also be open to new approaches. For example, what if you were to open up gossip and rumors about universities? Kids love to talk, right? People who are 20 years old will talk about all kinds of rumors about the university administration, other people on the university, classes, stuff like that. So looking for those kinds of niches in related areas can really help boost the buzz, boost the links, and boost the visibility to your website.
Guy Kawasaki: Matt, you said something very interesting and I don’t want to let it just slide by, you said that if you use WordPress, you basically have taken care of everything for SEO, can you support that?
Matt Cutts: Yeah sure, there was a really good article ah Stephan Spencer…
Guy Kawasaki: There you go pointing to an article again. (laughter)
Matt Cutts: All right so Stephan Spencer has talked about it but in general WordPress is pretty well SEO’d. Right? If you just start blogging you’ll pretty much be in good shape to get crawled by the search engines. In fact, WordPress 2.3 took some steps so that instead of having your content in three or four different places, they’re all unified on a single URL. So you can make your own HTML or you can pay some web designer to try to make a bunch of flash, but in some cases it makes sense to go for something that’s really cheap and really proven. And then if it works out you can always go with something custom down the road.
Stephan Spencer has a plug-in for WordPress: SEO Title Tag 2.1.2
I’m not certain, but I believe this is the Stephan Spencer article Matt Cutts was referring to.
Matt presented these tips as a result of Guy Kawasaki asking how they would game the search engines (there were five other search engine experts on the panel) if they were to leave their current employers (Cutts works for Google) and start their own business.
Other news from this last week’s PubCon include: Search and Blogging Reporters Forum, Matt Cutts on Directories and Links (from his Thursday morning presentation), Craig Newmark of Craigslist Kickoff Keynote (the first speaker of the four-day conference), Things I learned from Guy Kawasaki (the keynote speaker from PubCon 2006 who saw his blog move into the top 10 on Technorati as a result).
24 Comments
Great post! I second the WordPress sentiments. Every blog I’ve started with WordPress was indexed within a few days.
Ditto to that. I have had WordPress blogs sent organic traffic in less than 24 hours.
As to what Matt said, that is mostly common sense. However, getting people/businesses to actually stick with the blogging can be the tricky part. Most blogs get little traffic and no comments. To a business owner, no comments means the blog is a waste of time.
Another wasted opportunity.
I wish I had $12grand to start a site 😛 I think I’m doing alright though, I’m getting decent traffic and so far I’ve spent a total of $10 for the domain (though hosting is given to my from my friend).
maybe interesting for a total newbie, otherwise old and boring -.- Zzzzz
What I think some people are missing out on here is that this is the head of the Google Web Spam Team, and while the info is simple, he is pretty much saying you’ll get indexed (in Google) rather easily by using WordPress.
Marketing is another story.
It’s not just getting indexed – WordPress will organize your WHOLE SITE in such a way that it looks more relevant/interesting to Googlebot et al. The same could be said for the opensource CMSes Drupal and Joomla – they do the heavy lifting of keeping and sorting tags, prioritizing and aging content, and automatically generating human readable URLs (mysite.com/blog/12102007/furby, instead of mysite.com/001.asp).
There’s a ton of technical SEO that used to be done by hand, or using a series of apps/scripts and testing testing testing. Basically, with WordPress, all that is done for you, and you can skip ahead to “real marketing”, which is much more about getting good link reciprocation, visitor loyalty, and of course ad or product conversions.
I do think there’s some wisdom in there somewhere… Well i guess it’s true then, if your goal is to make a really good site… Is your goal to make money? … Hm… maybe then it’s all different. But I do think… that you can have a lot of long term success just by thinking more about quality. It’s amazing how little people think about quality actually…
I kinda expected an in-depth article; this one is a bit disappointing.
We shot a few interviews at Pubcon. We spoke with Matt Cutts and asked him about his thoughts on WordPress. You can see that interview here – http://www.reachd.com/ViewBlog/115/
Plus, here are the other 17 or so interviews that we did at Pubcon:
http://www.reachd.com/ReachdTV.ubr
Enjoy.
Good to see cheap and pathetic works on the Internet like it works on TV. Why would you waste your time creating a compelling service only to market it with gossip and manufactured controversy?
Lame.
Google dig(g)s WordPress !
WordPress has to much open doors for hackers. We not use WordPress.
Good advice… basic, but good.
Thx
Very well written. I hope many newbies would get a lot of help from this post. After all Matt is the ultimate guru to guide on these issues.
Good points there. I strongly agree with the blog part, wordpress does all the work for you (eccept for the writing). Make a blog people.
As opposed to wordpress it is quite difficult to create individual pages in blogger. While you can write post or pages in wordpress this enhancement is restricted in blogger that what makes people to go for wordpress nowadays ahead of blogger.
WordPress not eternity!
i don’t think so.
WordPress Blogs are definitely easy to use and Google loves them. There are some problems with being hacked. WordPress blogs are usually indexed within days and are very easy to set up, though. Therefore you do have more time to market your sites. Blogs are the wave of the future, because of their interaction with users. Much the way web2.0 sites have taken off, the interaction is crucial.
Word press is good service. These sites help people to speak the truth. Happens that crack, but not all people such.
I agree, wordpress is the way to go
I try and follow all the Matt Cutts says and I find this praise for WP slightly surprsing. maybe I’m just used to thinking of Google as being difficult to understand?
This is so simple I’m wondering what’s going on?
Interesting too that he mentions specific plugins
alex
WordPress is a great start to getting a presense out on the internet, I’d also follow it up with some social bookmarking, and even consider a tool such as auto social poster (wordpress plugin) or go for semiologic pro (not cheap).
Great article. Sometimes people looking for the holy grail miss the “basic” things. I recommend people always look at the basics before getting into the more advanced things when setting up a web site.
Chances are that doing the basics right (and finishing them all off properly instead of skipping to the exciting stuff) will get your website a good foothold in the search engines.
Cheers
Tim
Great post. You can also get indexed in google within 24 hours by submitting press releases to high PR rand news media websites. It even works in hours sometimes and you don’t have to wait a whole day. There is a trick to it, though. You have to use a niche keyword or keyphrase in the Press Release title and not one of those broad competitive keyword phrases. After you have submitted your press release, use the press release link and submit to digg, propeller, dropjack, and other similar bookmark websites.
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