Essential Reading: SEO & Adsense Optimisation Tips From Google

Finally some SEO advice that can be validated. There are so many ‘experts’ on the subject of SEO that I’m never sure if changes I’ve made are having a positive or negative effect on my rankings.

Well, these tips are definitely bankers as they came out in an interview Matt Cutts, a senior Google engineer did with Performancing.

The tips he gave on how to optimise traffic are all very useful:

• Take the time to read Google’s webmaster guidelines
• Don’t bother with year/month/day in blog urls; Just use the first few words from the title of the post in the url
• Don’t try to rank for a huge phrase at first - pick a smaller niche and get to be known as an expert there, and then build your way out and up
• Controversial posts are sure to build links, but too many controversial posts may undermine your credibility.
• Commenting on other blogs isn’t that useful. There are a lot of ways to build a reputation, from having a great blog to producing a unique service to speaking at conferences.
• A single creative idea that catches fire in the blogosphere or digg.com is probably more useful than just chasing/buying/trading links.
• Original information or research is great bait to attract links

The additional tip I appreciated the most was the tip on how to improve Adsense targetting through Section targetting.

Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like Google to emphasise or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content.

The HTML tags to emphasise a page section take the following format:

I’ve implemented these tags around the article section in my HTML so hopefully once my pages are re-indexed my targetting will improve, which should improve my CTR.

Thanks Matt!