Since he has a LOT of videos (174 as of this writing) that discuss a LOT of different topics, I felt it would be useful to put all of the answers here in one easy-to-reference blog post that will concisely answer the question for you rather than having to watch the entire set of videos.

Note that as of this writing this is not all inclusive.  As time permits I will continue to add snippets of answers.

Links to the specific videos themselves are included as well as the date that the videos were added to help give you some reference.

[table id=1 /]

During this talk (which runs around 45 minutes), Matt revealed some very interesting facts and ideas about SEO which I found…well…enlightening as I’m sure you will too.

If you do have the time to watch the entire video for yourself (like I said it runs about 45 minutes); see my notes below the video which gives you plenty of highlights.

In the video Matt States:

• WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the mechanics of SEO. [@3:30]
  • Mechanics = “how crawlable a website is.”
• Plugins Matt uses: [@4:15]
  • Askimet
  • Cookies for Comments
    • Spam prevention.
  • Enforce www. Preference
    • What you prefer (canonical).
  • FeedBurner FeedSmith
  • WP Super Cache
• “We crawl roughly in order of PageRank.  The more PR you have the faster you’re likely to be found, the deeper we’ll crawl, the more often we’ll visit.” [@5:40]
  • PageRank = the number of people that link to you and how important those links are.  (basic SEO).
  • Example:  A web page has a PR of 9 and has three outlinks (links heading out and away from the website) then each of those outlinks gets 3.
  • PageRank starts to “evaporate” each time it goes across a link.
  • Getting backlinks:  You want people to know you and you want them to be reputable.
• Blog posts need to be on-topic and you want to be reputable. [@9:40]
  • How to do this:
    • If you don’t love it, don’t write about it.
      • Write often, write every day.
    • What am I good at doing?
    • What do I have to say?
• Keywords [@12:05]
  • Think about all the different ways someone can describe something. Put those into your blog post naturally.
  • Jargon mis-match:  Translate [jargon] into regular language.
    • what are titles you could type that are “normal”.
  • Use Google Keyword Tool.
  • If you don’t have [a specific word] on your site you probably aren’t going to rank.
• Custom Structure on URLs “/%postname%/ [@19:15]
• Google looks at over 200 things [when determining where to rank you]
  • Things in the title
  • Things in the URL
  • Things that are highlighted like H1 tags and stuff like that.
  • Be sure you put the keywords in the title in some way.
  • Power Tip:  Use variations between the post title itself and within the URL itself [the permalink].  Not spam.  One or two variants.  Use them as separate opportunities to put keywords in.  Now you can rank for both variations of the keywords.
• Use categories that are also good keywords.
• Keywords in URL paths:  example.com/my-keywords
  • Dashes are best
  • Next best is underscores
  • No spaces is worst.
• If you’ve already done your site should you change things?
  • No.
• Don’t overdo [on page SEO]
  • After you mention a term two or three times Google knows what your post is about.
• Gaining a reputation [@25:24]
  • Be interesting. Funny, alternative opinions.
  • Update often.
  • Apply Katamari Philosophy.
    • Start small.  Start in a niche that you can do well.
    • Build up, build up, build up.  Get there gradually.
  • Ways to Get Links [@30:14 in the video]
    • Provide a useful service.
    • Do original research or reporting. Huge!
    • Give great information.
    • Find a creative niche.  One good idea can carry you so, so far.
    • Write some code.  Open source.
    • Live blogging!  Blogging as it happens.
    • Make lists.  People love lists.
    • Create controversy.  Too often sometimes can’t work well.
    • Meet folks on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed
• Should you do a podcast?
  • Recommends videos over podcasts.
  • Videos tend to rank relatively well on Google.
• Tools you should know about [@35:55]
  • Webmaster console at http://Google.com/webmasters/
  • Google Analytics
  • FeedBurner:  MyBrand for free feeds.mattcutts.com instead of feeds.feedburner.com.
  • Google website optimizer
  • Custom Search Engine: free site search
  • AdSense
    • Use these tags to mark out the meat of your blog post so that AdSense will only target what’s contained in the tags: (highly recommended)
      • <!–google_ad_section_start–>
      • <!– google_ad_section_end –>
• Google Analytics Tip [@38:12]
  • Click Settings -> top landing pages and will tell you which blog posts get the most visitors.
  • Bounces tell you how often people come to your page and then leave.
  • Simple trick:  Show related posts.
• What NOT to do [@40:19]
  • Avoid paid posts.
• Keep your WordPress updated!
• Power Tip: [@43:57]
  • Add an .htaccess to your /wp-admin
    • This says only these two IP addresses are allowed to use the wp-admin.
    • Search for “protect wp-admin”.  Also on Matt’s blog.
• In WP core 2.8 you don’t have to worry about the rel=canonical tags.  Already included. [@44:50]

Everyone who runs a website has at one point or another worried about whether or not their site is being silently penalized in the search engines for having duplicate content.

Just to be sure everyone’s on the same page let’s first define what duplicate content REALLY is.

When you have two pages that are identical to one another on your own website, this is considered duplicate content.  And chances are you likely have duplicate content but you just don’t know it.

Here’s why that would happen…

Let’s say that you have a website located at http://www.Example.com.

You create a new web page on your site and have a few people link to that page.

• Person #1 links to you using http://www.Example.com.
• Person #2 links to you using http://Example.com (notice the lack of the “www”).
• Person #3 links to you using http://www.Example.com/ (notice the trailing slash).
• And Person #4 links to you using http://www.Example.com/index.html (notice the “index.html).

To YOU and to the people visiting your site, this is all the same page.

To the SEARCH ENGINES however, these are all different URLs. Surprised?

So as far as the search engines are concerned you have 4 pages on your site that all contain the same exact content – hence, the duplicate content issue.

You see, search engines can’t tell that these are the same URLs (I’m shaking my head as I say that because it’s still beyond me), but, the fact remains, that this is in fact, very true.

So how do you fix this issue?  Well, thankfully, there’s a few ways to fix this issue.

1. When you link internally, that is, link to other pages within your own website, consistently use the same URL.  ALWAYS use http://www.Example.com or http://Example.com -whichever one is your preferred way of linking, choose one and stick with it.
2. Additionally you can also use a 301 redirect to point to your preferred way of linking to your URL.  For example, if you prefer http://www.Example.com then set up a 301 redirect on http://Example.com, http://www.Example.com/, http://www.Example.com/index.html, etc.  (I’ve listed below the most common ways people would link to your site).
3. Within your Google webmaster tools area you can TELL Google what you’re preferred way of linking is.
4. Be sure that when you submit a sitemap for your website that within that sitemap, all of the URLs are using your preferred way of linking.

Some potential issues are:

1. If you don’t have direct control over the webhost that administers your files, you’ll have to have someone else place that 301 redirect on the URLs you want.
2. A lot of free web hosts don’t let you create a 301 redirect.
3. Session IDs on a website can create a huge duplicate content issue.  Since each page may be accessed with a different session ID in the URL, that page may be indexed multiple times; even though it’s the same page.

Now if all else fails and you simply can’t implement a 301 redirect to your preferred way of linking, then consider placing the canonical link element on the individual page.

In the head of the individual web page you’d place the following:

<head>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.Example.com/page.html” />
</head>

Note the trailing slash after “page.html”.  This is very important to include.

The bottom line is, using the canonical link element on your website is EXTREMELY beneficial to you.  But first and foremost, use the methods listed in the first four items at the top and if those fail, then use the canonical link element.

This information has summarized what Matt Cutts said in his 20-minute presentation; but if you want more information, here’s a few more places you can check out:

• The Matt Cutts video.
• The blog post at Google webmaster central.
• Yahoo’s blog post.
• Microsoft

And, as promised, here’s a list of URLs that are all different in the search engines eyes and that might cause duplicate content issues:

• www.Example.com
• Example.com
• www.Example.com/
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/index.html
• www.example.com/Home.aspx
• example.com/Home.aspx

There are 6 heading types ranging from most important to least important:

• H1
• H2
• H3
• H4
• H5
• H6

The most commonly used header tags are H1 and H2 tags.  This is because whenever a search engine like Google comes across your web page they’ll look for a header within that page’s content because a header tells the search engines what kind of information is contained on that page.

So if you were writing a page about “rainy days” and rainy days was your keyword for that page you would then place that phrase within an H1 tag to signify that it was important.

Of course, a heading on a page should also make sense to human beings as well.  So we might use:

“How Many Rainy Days Are There In Florida in a Year” and then place this phrase within an H1 tag.

The H2 tags are used as sub-headings.  So if you wanted to expand a little further on the topic in the H1 tag, then you’d add your sentence within an H2 tag underneath the H1 tag.

Some site owners in an effort to game the search engines will place the entire content of the page within an H1 tag hoping that the search engines will give that page more relevance and then fix up the rest of the text on the page so that it looks “normal”; in other words, not large like a typical H1 tag would be.

Not only can this get you red-flagged in the search engines, it will end up making your web page look ridiculous in the event that the rest of the text you wanted to look “normal” doesn’t load or work properly.

However there are times when you may want to use multiple H1 tags on a page and this is perfectly fine, provided it works well with your content.

For example, if you were talking about various different topics on one web page, the titles of those topics could be contained within an H1 tag.

The bottom line is, when you use H1 or H2 tags, keep it simple and use it the way it was meant to be used.  Anything contained within the H1 tag should be the main title of the page and anything in an H2 tag would be the sub-title or the sub-heading.  Rarely will you find a need for H3 – H6 tags but there is sometimes the occasional need for these.

Here’s what one user asked Google’s Matt Cutts about the topic which should help shed a little more light on H1 tags for you.

Today I’ve decided to give you some pretty darn important information about SEO straight from Google’s own Matt Cutts.  The information you’ll find in this blog post are the important points to take away from Matt’s videos on the YouTube Google Webmaster Help Channel.  I highly suggest that you subscribe to this channel as it almost always contains information that’s important for you to know if you’re optimizing your own site.

That said, here are the points that you should take away from these videos.

From “Should I tweak my titles and descriptions to improve my CTR?”

• SEO is not all about position in the search engines.  It’s also about getting those visitors to come to your site.
• Title and description tags absolutely can increase your CTR (click through rate).
• The description should entice people to visit your site.

From “More than one H1 on a page:  good or bad?“

• If you have multiple sections on your web page, it’s not a bad idea to have those separated into different H1 (header) tags.
• Do not use an entire H1 on your page and then modify with CSS.

From “Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?“

• Use dashes or hyphens if you can.
• Dashes or hyphens are considered as separators and underscores are not.

From “Two questions about nofollow“

• Google does not follow links from Wikipedia.

From “Does the position of keywords in the URL affect ranking?“

• Example:  example.com/keyword/London better than example.com/London/keyword?
• Helps a little bit to have keywords in your URL.
• 4 or 5 keywords might work well.
• On his blog he’ll take the first 2-5 words related to his post and use that as the URL.
• Don’t worry about where the keywords are in the URL.

From “Why does Google index blogs faster than other sites?“

• Google does not guarantee that if you submit a sitemap, they’ll go crawl it.
• There’s a difference between indexing and crawling.  A ping will cause Google Blog search to crawl you.
• If you do show up you’ll show up in the “Blog search corpus” not the “index corpus”.

I suggest that to get the most out of the information Google does provide to you to take a moment and watch these videos (as well as the others that are there).  They’re short and to the point.

As Quick Online Tips found out, the new update to this plugin, version 1.4.9 now adds the canonical link element (also referred to as the canonical link tag).  But, it might not work the way you would expect it to.

Here’s what was discovered:

We host our WordPress blog in a subdirectory called “Archives”. Its easy tohost WordPress in an alternative directory. So the canonical url of the front page should be

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.quickonlinetips.com/" />

while the hosted blog archives page should be

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/" />

But when I looked into the source code of the main page and the archives page, both show this

which basically means that when search engines visitquickonlinetips.com, the canonical url tells them / redirects them with information that the actual page of choice which we want to index  isquickonlinetips.com/archives/and that creates a whole lot of confusion in the search engines.

What they discovered was that the All in One SEO plugin was taking what it felt was the right canonical link tag and assigning it to pages as it saw fit and which at first glance, seems logical.  However, what this did for Quick Online Tips (as well as many other sites I would imagine), was erronously assign the wrong URL.

Just to double check this information, I updated this same plugin on one of my other sites, http://KristineWirth.com just to see how the new update to the All in One SEO Plugin worked.

I currently have my URLs set to the non-www version for this site.

When updating the plugin I noticed that the canonical link element updated to http://KristineWirth.com/ (notice the ending slash).  This URL (with the ending slash) is considered a completely separate URL in the eyes of Google.

So with the new canonical link element added to this plugin, it was telling Google to index my pages with the slash rather than without which could end up hurting my rankings.  (And yours as well).

You can read the earlier post on BoneheadSEO about the canonical link element as well as watch Google’s Matt Cutts explain how it works in a 20-minute long video.

One way to alert Google of the preferred way of indexing the URLs of your site is to add your site to Google’s Webmaster Tools (if you haven’t done so already and under the “Settings” link on the left choose the preferred domain for your site.)  This will tell Google which URL you prefer for your website.

Additionally, Google will also make reference to your sitemap file.  When you add your sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools it will also use this as a reference point.  So if your sitemap file points to http://www.BoneheadSEO.com for example, then Google will know that your preferred URL is with the “www”.

Within the Bonehead SEO Course, I explain how to set up this XML file the right way.

So, if you’re currently using the All in One SEO Plugin on your WordPress blog, and either have or intend on updating it to the new version, I would suggest that after you update the plugin, you go into the settings of the plugin and uncheck the “Canonical URLs” box.

The link operator allows you to see who is linking to you in Google’s eyes as well as who may be linking to your competition.  The way that you use Google’s link operator, is to just go to Google, enter in the word link and then a colon and then the URL of the site.  Like so:

The biggest gripe that people have had with the link operator is that it doesn’t show you a true count of links pointing to a website.  Matt’s explanation for this is that the reason Google doesn’t show all of the backlinks is that “spammers or competitors could use that to reverse someone’s ranking.”

Thank goodness there’s still tools available like Yahoo’s site explorer tool to get numbers of backlinks to any one site.

As it stands, even using Yahoo’s tool will only locate up to 1,000 backlinks for any domain, which still doesn’t touch the tip of the iceberg when you’re up against a highly competitive site.  Take for example, CNN.com who easily has hundreds of thousands of incoming links to their site.

But, even so, the Site Explorer tool will give you plenty of data to start working on your own link-building campaign for your site.

I can’t say I see eye-to-eye on Google about this restriction simply because the Internet is “The Internet”.  If our websites were meant to be private then we’d password protect directories, exclude directories and pages within our robots.txt files, and more which many sites already do.

My take on the explanation is that Google just doesn’t “want” to show you all of the backlinks because you would in fact be able to reverse-engineer how Google ranks sites.  And since the data that you receive from Yahoo! is based on information contained at Yahoo! then you still aren’t able to reverse engineer any data from Google.

He does however go on to say that if you want to see all of your backlinks for your site, that all you need to do is sign up and use Google’s webmaster central which is helpful to see more information about your own sites.  But as far as not showing all backlinks to any one given site, well, I could probably write an entire opinion piece on how Google tracks nearly every move you make but when it comes to information that should be available to the general public it closes up shop.

You’re an intelligent person, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Highlights

1. Google trends discovers the search volume differences between keyword phrases as well as using Google Trends for websites to see what the search volumes look like for a set of websites.  It will also show you related sites so if you typed in MattCutts.com then you’d see a list of sites that people also went to (latent sites).
2. Google Ad Manager – allows you to manage all of the ads on your site including whatever third party ads you want to have.
3. Google Ad Planner – let’s you choose demographic areas.
4. Google has introduced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) in some PDFs.  Some PDFs only contain a snapshot of what the page would look like.  With Google’s OCR they can take those pictures of text, run the OCR program and then index those just like regular text.
5. Better crawling of Flash.  Always good to have static HTML in addition to flash.
6. Better processing of JavaScript.
7. Better at keyword spam.
8. Show URLS that link to the 404 pages on your site.
9. Custom 404 pages.  Using 14 lines of JavaScript in your 404 template so the JS will run and suggest other pages on your site that would be useful.  Find within Google Webmaster Central Blog.
10. Advanced segmentation introduced in Google Analytics.
11. On-demand indexing for Google Custom Searches.  You can request that Google index a certain page “on-demand” and “usually within 24 hours”.  Note that this does not affect search results as a whole but will affect Google Custom Searches.
12. Webmaster Communication with Google.  Including webmaster chats.  Many times there will be a Q&A at the end.
13. If you register for Google Webmaster central they will hold all of your messages for you.
14. Identified sites that are hackable.  The message center will notify you if they believe your site falls into this category.
15. Produced a 22-page PDF talking about SEO.  “Google does not hate SEO.”  They use internally and those outside of Google can also use this as well.  “A good SEO can help you put your best foot forward.”
16. They see a continuation of Black Hat trends.  People grabbing expired domains and put p0_rn on it.  You’ll also see it get more vicious.  It will be more common to see your site hacked.  Mainly due to the openings on a web host provider.  Blackhat moves to the outright illegal.  Using DNS subdomain hijacking.  You try to take control of another persons sub-domain.  They’ll also use and take advantage of a cross-site scripting flaw and then try to install malware on your machine.  “If this is what it takes to compete in the black hat SEO world, is it worth it?