He has also the reputation of not telling the whole side of the story. Because of the nature of his job he is probably forced to keep away from our ears some “details”. Bellow you can find some of the interviews and Q&A sessions with Matt Cutts.

Answers related to on-page SEO and website structure:

• How to structure a site?
• What’s a preferred site structure?
• What do I do after being hacked?
• Can I tell Google not to use the posting date in my snippet?
• Is excessive whitespace in the HTML source bad?
• Can I disallow crawling of my CSS and JavaScript files?
• Do ids in heading tags affect search engines?
• More than one H1 on a page: good or bad?
• Matt Cutts Discusses the Importance of alt Tags
• Does the ordering of heading tags matter?
• Should I use nofollow in links to my disclaimer and privacy policy?

Answers related to Search Engine Optimization:

• How can I optimize for
• How do I optimize an e-commerce site without rich content?
• Should I tweak my titles and descriptions to improve my CTR?
• Two questions about nofollow
• Is redirecting a large number of domains suspicious?
• Qualities of a good site
• Optimize for SE or Users?
• Some SEO myths
• How to Get Better Visibility on Google
• Which SEO agency do you recommend?
• Will SEO still exist in five years?
• Will domain registration changes ding me in Google?
• Can you talk about the change in Google’s referrer string?
• How can new pages get indexed quickly?
• What are your views on PageRank sculpting?
• Can product descriptions be considered duplicate content?
• Why is the @ character ignored in search queries?

Answers related to urls-s:

• Does the position of keywords in the URL affect ranking?
• Does anchor text carry through 301 redirects?
• Should I strip file extensions from my URLs?
• Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?
• Static vs. Dynamic urls

Answers related to Google Analytics:

• Is SearchWiki or Analytics data used for ranking?
• Does Google Analytics work with Web 2.0 and social media?
• Does Webspam use Google Analytics?

Answers related to social media:

• Has Google changed the relevancy it awards to social media?
• Is Google doing anything different for Twitter results?

Answers related with the way Google is indexing your website:

• Should we expect more spelling corrections in search results?
• Why does Google index blogs faster than other sites?
• Are Google SERPs moving to Ajax?
• What can I do if a competitor is spamming?
• Is Google putting more weight on brands in rankings?
• Matt Cutts Discusses Snippets
• Supplemental Results
• Reinclusion requests
• Milestone Founder Interviews Matt Cutts
• Hotel Travel Industry Search Trends by Google’s Matt Cutts – Part 2.1
• Hotel Travel Industry Search Trends by Google’s Matt Cutts – Part 2.2
• State of the Index 2008
• My tips for SES
• Crawl dates in the Google cache
• Recap of SES San Jose 2006
• Do site load times have an impact on Google rankings?
• Why is the @ character ignored in search queries?
• Do not buy links for SEO
• Can I publish 100+ pages at once?
• Will DiggBar create duplicate content issues?

Answers related to canonical rel:

• Can rel=”canonical” index my hostname and not my IP address?
• Does rel=”canonical” make it safe to use tracking parameters?
• Canonical Link Element
• Matt Cutts Explains Canonical Tags from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft

Answers related to other Google products:

• Matt Cutts Discusses Webmaster Tools
• Two questions about the link: operator
• Will Google add guest accounts to Webmaster Tools?
• Will Google use non-link references as a signal?
• Will Google provide a rank-checking service?
• Google Datacenters
• Google Webmaster Tools
• How are load times displayed in Webmaster Tools calculated?
• Why aren’t penalized sites notified in Webmaster Tools?
• Datacenter comments
• Matt Cutts, Google, discusses mobile search
• Preventing Virtual Blight
• Interview with Matt Cutts
• Google Terminology
• Lightning Round!

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

Matt Cutts is answering your SEO questions

Related posts:

1. Google SEO starter guide

Press Release Submitter has a database which is already used in our press release distribution service. At the moment we have 15.000 media contacts from US, later we will add also German, Spanish, French and Romanian media contacts.

The application will be easy to use, in the line of Article Submitter or Website Submitter. Some of functionalities will be:

1. language detection and spam filter (a press release in German canot be send to a english contact)
2. the possibility to filter the media contacts based on complex selections, categories, TV, radio, magazines etc
3. The PR sending is done using SMTP ( support + SSL), with defined delay time between sending
4. Editing capabilities for the database of media contacts (import, blocking contacts etc)

Here are bellow 2 images with Press Release Submitter (eta 01.07.2009, the estimation price will be 279$ ).

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

First news about Press Release Submitter

Related posts:

1. How to get press attention

The small ebook is produced in partnership with Microsoft Office Live Small Business and is aimed to small businesses. The book touches the following themes: What is Social Media?, Case Study: They don’t use social media in my industry, Blogging“ The front door to social media, Case Study: Blogging Customer Stories, RSS , Social search, Social bookmarking, Social networks.

I will quote also the author conclusion:

As you can see, when technology is leveraged to facilitate and enhance social interaction, a great deal of value can be created. But tread carefully. This savvy audience can be turned off if approached in the wrong way. Use these new tools properly and they’ll prove to be invaluable in your effort to strengthen existing customer relationships and capture the hearts and minds of new consumers.

The ebook is free to download.

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

Free eBook TALK Social Media for Small Business

Google has released a few days ago in an official post a 22 page PDF document outlining recommendations for web site optimization rules. The basic guide is touching a number of basic elements, such as titles, meta descriptions, no follow link attributes, hyphen etc.

You can download and read the Google SEO starte guider PDF. The document is a great proof of what all SEO-s are doing, a chance to validate the value of your techniques and it validates the SEO practice overall.

The main chapters in the starter guide are:

- Create unique, accurate page titles
- Good practices for page title tags
- Make use of the “description” meta tag
- Good practices for description meta tags
- Improve the structure of your URLs
- Good practices for URL structure
- Make your site easier to navigate
- Good practices for site navigation
- Offer quality content and services
- Good practices for content
- Write better anchor text
- Good practices for anchor text
- Use heading tags appropriately
- Good practices for heading tags
- Optimize your use of images
- Good practices for images
- Make effective use of robots.txt
- Good practices for robots.txt
- Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links
- Promote your website in the right ways
- Good practices for promoting your website
- Make use of free webmaster tools
- Take advantage of web analytics services

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current. So, the next time we get the question, “I’m new to SEO, how do I improve my site?”, we can say, “Well, here’s a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.”

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

Google SEO starter guide

Related posts:

1. Matt Cutts is answering your SEO questions

Here is bellow my list of Firefox plugins which are helping me on the SEO work or on checking some parameters for a website, for bloging etc:

Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

ScreenGrab

Screengrab! is an extension for Firefox that makes it easy to save a web-page as an image. With it, you can save anything that you can see in a browser window – from a small selection, to a complete page.

Google UnPersonalized

This plugin prevents you from seeing personalized search results, when searching from your browser’s search box. In Firefox, this plugin also adds suggest functionality.

InFormEnter

InFormEnter adds a small, clickable icon next to every input field in a web form, from where you can select the item to be inserted – no typing required. You can configure it to display your frequently used information such as name, email, address…

User Agent Switcher

Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.

Search Status

SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox hat allows you to see how any and every website in the world is performing. Designed for the highly specialised needs of search engine marketers, this toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.

TwitBin

TwitBin is an extension for firefox that brings the power of twitter right in your browser.

Seo Quake

Seoquake is a powerful tool, aimed at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake allows user to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly.

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

SEO and Firefox

Hard to belive, but if you are a ISV or microISV, Microsoft is offering in BizSpark (a program launched towards ISV and microISV at European Software Conference 2008). If you are a small company Microsoft will offer you the tools, database and even hosting for developing your applications for FREE. Is such an offer possible?

The conditions are simple:

• Actively engaged in development of a software-based product or service that will form a core piece of its current or intended business1
• Privately held
• In business for less than 3 years, and
• Less than US $1 million in annual revenue.
• To be eligible to use the software for production and deployment of hosted solutions, startups must also be developing a new software as a service solution (on any platform) to be delivered over the Internet

What is Microsoft going to offer you:

Design, development, testing and demonstrations rights with regard to:

• All the software included in the Visual Studio Team System Team Suite (VSTS) with MSDN Premium subscription
• Expression Studio (Version 2)
• VSTS Team Foundation Server (Standard Edition)
• Production Use rights to host a “software as a service” solution (developed by the startup during their participation, on any platform) over the Internet, with regard to products including: Windows Server (all versions up to and including Enterprise); SQL Server (all versions); Office SharePoint Server; Systems Center, and BizTalk Server and all these for your whole development team

Above all these, the support will be free. Hard to believe such an program exists. There is catch you will ask? A 100$ program offering fee is due when the Startup exits the Program. As part of Microsoft’s commitment to Startup success, there are no initial costs for Startups to join BizSpark.

More information can be found in this pdf.

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

Microsoft BizSpark is offering free licenses

Related posts:

1. ESWC 2008 – Free SEO Audit and advices

The conference was a surprise for me, the quality in the presentations is increased from the last year, a lot of information available. The whole concept of the ESWC was based this time on 2 Tracks (2 presentations in the same time). Usually the ISV-s are shy guys/gals, but this time the audience really was open on questions and on debate on different topics.

I will do a pros/cons of the conference ( I do not have photos at all, but I hope the “Avangate guys” will let me use some of their photos):

Pros:

1. Is good to have a conference in Europe, and not only the SIC for USA, ISDEF for Rusia.
2. The orientation in the conference is towards ISV and microISV and should remain like this.
3. The panels are most of the time formed of entrepreneurs+isv+marketers and you have because of this the possibility to hear all the sides of the developing, support, sale process for a software product of online service/product
4. A lot of known people ASP (Mike), Tucows (Greg), Avangate (Adriana and Florin – thank you for the bear and the clever text on the t-shirt), ShareIt (Tatyana), and a lot of developers I knew from ASP (Oliver) or from the last year. A good opportunity to discuss your techniques and to compare them with the other used techniques, the ESWC is no place for self promotion but more trying to share and gather information and to do networking.

Cons:

1. If the last year there were 7 Romanian speakers now only 3 (is the recession?!)
2. Too much discussions about AdWords (that is why my jokes were around this theme)
3. Too bad I reserved in the other Maritim hotel, I had to take a taxi 3-4 times between the hotels
4. I will make a note for the next time “do not talk business on launch otherwise you will have no time for eating”
5. Next time 3 times more promotional CD-s with me
6. The wireless in the hotel was 8 euros for 60 minutes

In the seond day of the conference I took part in a panel: ISV business – how to make it effective together wit Alwin Hoogerdijk – Collectorz.com (Moderator), Tetyana Franke – sales Manager share-it! and Florin – e-commerce Consultant Avangate. An open discussion with the audience, with questions regarding bug tracking options, payment processors, support, promotion etc.

The audience was interested in the subject (as far I have seen), I tried to keep a my responses in the humor/serious side, the audience was really willing to have more information from us and more willing to ask questions (comparing with the last year). Again a lot of interest in how you promote your busiones, and how you do it cheap.

I will start to present slowly some of the new things presented and the ways these can be integrated, probably I will start with the solution from deal united.

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

European Software Conference 2008 (ESWC 2008)

Related posts:

1. ESWC 2008 – Free SEO Audit and advices
2. Microsoft BizSpark is offering free licenses

So if you are willing to take this offer send me some details about your website on the form on our search optimization service page. Also add the note for ESWC 2008 and I will make sure we will find time to analyze it until there.

I will take a maximum 5 websites for which I am going to suggest improvements.

Update: 4 places left

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

ESWC 2008 – Free SEO Audit and advices

Related posts:

1. European Software Conference 2008 (ESWC 2008)
2. Microsoft BizSpark is offering free licenses

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

How to get press attention

Related posts:

1. First news about Press Release Submitter

The Long Tail is the phenomenon that the sum of less frequent searches is greater than the sum of the top searches. The tail are the niche products, individually unimportant, but collectively significant.

One example of this is the theory’s prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don’t individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may someday rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.

Long Tails everywhere?

The Long Tail is one of those business books that, ironically, deserves more than a niche readership. Anderson encourage others to see Long Tails everywhere, so my vision of “Long Tail of Searches” and “Long Tail of Online Marketing” is illustrated in the bellow charts.

Listen to the podcast with Chris Anderson talking about the ideas in his new book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

The Long Tail of SEO and searches