Google Adsense Matt Cutts

8 Tips on SEO URLs
What Matts said on optimizing URLs:

Do not put your blog at the root of your domain. Try putting it on a subdomain or a subdirectory. People will link to your root domain and to your blog. That will be an extra pagerank point and a room for future expansion. But, if you already have in the root, it’s not a big deal. Consider this only if you’re starting a blog.
Use dashes to separate keywords in your URLs. Google is considering underscore as a good keyword separator. Dashes and underscores are better than no space at all. Though Google can segment keywords from combined words without space, other search engines cannot like Gigablast, Ask.com, Turbo10, etc.
Don’t change URLs of your old posts and do a permanent or 301 redirect, if you’ve already done it with no spaces. But use dashes in your future post URLs.
You may use URL extensions such as .php, .asp, .cfm, .htm, .html, etc. except .exe.
Dynamic URLs with question marks or hash marks are treated by Google as static URL but keep the number of parameters up to 3 only. Otherwise, it will not be crawled by Googlebot.
Google doesn’t really care how much or how detailed your URLs are. Page rank flows completely independent of how many slashes there are.
Standardize your URL. Choose one from: with www, without www, with slash, with /index.*. Search engine treat them as different URL and you will not get the full credit if the your backlinks are in different format. Analyze your backlink URLs before you decide.
Use your own domain name in your FeedBurner feeds thru FeedBurner MyBrand.It’s free. So if you wanna get rid of FeedBurner you can always just leave it behind. And, changing to your own domain name will have no impact to your old FeedBurner URL.

6 Tips on Accessibility and Usability
Matt’s optimization tips to make your blog or site accessible or usable to most of the users:

Use Alt tags on your images as it makes big difference in search engines. Matt said there’s a blind guy at Google, who can’t see image but can read Alt tags (?). Don’t make him angry.
You may use a full sentence in Alt tags but don’t overdo it or use irrelevant keywords like cheap-cheap-Viagra-online-mesothelioma-debt-consolidation-mortgage-payment. 7 to 8 words are fine but Matt prefers 3 up to 5 words.
Do a podcast or video. Matt shared a valuable tip how to choose between podcast and video. Submit a picture of yourself to hotornot.com. If you got a rating of 7 and above, then do a video. Otherwise, podcast is more appropriate. Don’t just believe on what your mother has been saying to you.
Use Wordpress for your blog and you’re guaranteed your site is crawlable. Default Wordpress install is almost optimal in terms of crawlability.
Don’t use frame sets or other sorts of weird stuff as it don’t work well on iPhones and other cell phones or mobile phones or GSMs. Many people are now accessing sites on their phones.
Show dates of the post because people wanna know when your post was created.

4 Tips on Link Building, Link-bait and PageRank
Matt’s advice on link building, link bait and increasing PageRank:

Don’t worry about the supplemental results as there’s not much you can do about it. It’s an exclusive PageRank business.
Be creative and get huge amount of backlinks. That’s huge amount of PageRank. Below are the best examples of creative concepts for effective link building and getting huge amount of web site traffic:
==> LOLCat Builder
==> Lonely Girl Fifteen on video
==> Million Pixel Homepage
==> Making a Mac versus PC parody
==> The Free Hugs Campaign
==> Parez Hilton
==> Video of people saying the word “Google” really fast for about five minutes
==> Dr. David’s picture of bloggers and cartoons of what they want to be
==> Counting and comparing the spam emails received
on Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo
==> Live-Blog on Techmeme
==> John Dvorak’s Creative controversy
==> Robert Scoble Mention a-listers
==> Jeremy Schumaker’s poll: George Bush - Great President Or Greatest President Ever?
==> Matt Cutts’ got hacked on 1st of April and he really got hacked

Selling links and buying links are against Google guidelines and Google take serious action against it. If you want to sell links make sure that they don’t effect search engines. You can do a link through a url that re-directs and then robot that text out, you can use java script, you can use the no follow tag, that’s fine.
The best advice is to make great compelling content and come up with some hook, some social engineering, the gimmick, the angle that’s going to make your stuff go viral.

Adsense Tip
Matt on Adsense:

Use adsense section targeting. Just take the meat of your post and Google ads will be more focused about what you’re actually talking about. That means more clicks and more adsense revenues for you.


7 Recommended Tools and Plugins
Matt recommended the following web tools and plugins:

Use Akismet math comments spam protection. This stops a lot of people spamming your blog.
Use polls to promote democracy like asking “Which type of pet do you have?”
Use SEO title tool from Stephan, which swaps the name of your blog with your post title and other stuff.
Use Google Analytics and find out where your web site traffic is coming from. You will know if they are coming from the queries that people are using or from direct links or from people that type in your URL. It’s free.
Check your robots.txt as it may be blocking your URL completely. Use robots.txt to disallow search engine bots to crawl particular page or directory in your site.
Use 404 handler to redirect any external broken links or backlinks to your homepage or to any of your URL and receive free web site traffic. You may check your broken backlinks thru Google Analytics.
Develop for IPhone apps. There are important sites that host IPhone apps or IPhone directories where you can get a lot of web site traffic.