Funny How People Will Take What Matt Cutts Says As SEO Advice

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 24 of June , 2008 at 7:38 pm

Chris McElroy, AKA namecritic left a comment on this morning’s post USA Today Interviews Matt Cutts On Search Engine Optimization and I just had to take his opening line in reply.

My post was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek response to his interview - perhaps my tongue was not pushed far enough into my cheek. The interview was pretty much a Google search engine optimization how to, although nothing of real interest was revealed - certainly nothing new.

Chris makes a valid point when he states:

But maybe some other search engines do pay attention to those things. Google will not punish you for using keywords as a meta, so why ignore anything that might help a website get traffic from another source?

To take his point a little further, I think search engine optimization can be broken into three components:

Minimum SEO Requirements:
Generally speaking the minimum search engine optimization strategies required to get your page noticed and ranked within all of the search engines.

Wont Hurt To Include:
Search engine optimization strategies that, whilst they may not have your pages shooting to number one, add that little extra without suffering any penalties.

Time Wasters:
There are time wasters when it comes to search engine optimization. An example is trying to stuff content full of keywords and trying to make is look ‘natural’ to both the reader and the search engine. You can spend a lot of time creating this type of content with little or no benefit and perhaps the risk of penalties for over stuffing.

It can be interesting to read a lot of the information that comes out of Google. At times they talk like they are the only search engine in town and that all search engine optimization strategies should be targeted at them.

The long term reality is that no webmaster can afford to rely on just the one search engine for traffic. Until Google can claim to provide 100% of all search traffic, you have to be able to claim your share from any of the other providers.

Having a search engine optimization strategy that covers all the basics for all the search engines should be every webmaster (and bloggers) primary aim. If you can repeatedly get those basics right, you can then work at tightening individual pages. If you don’t have those basics to begin with, you will have little chance of any meaningful rank on any of the search engines.

Thanks for your reminder Chris.

Category: SEO

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