Matt Cutts’ Lecture – Whitehat SEO tips for Bloggers

by John P.

MattCutts WordCamp 2007 LectureThis is a video of the one hour long lecture given by Matt Cutts at the WordCamp 2007 conference in San Francisco, CA two weeks ago on the topic of Whitehat SEO tips for Bloggers.

For those not familiar, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and this lecture is all about ways to make your Web site rank higher in Google and the other search engines. I’ve also written an article on this topic called Improving Search Engine Rankings over at HTMLHelp.com.

Matt’s presentation is available here, and when I get a chance I’ll try to go back and plug them into the video in the appropriate spots. In the meantime I did manage to get most, if not all, of them on film although they might be a little difficult to read – especially in the low quality versions required by the video hosting sites.

This video is currently available on Viddler, Revver (Part 1, Part 2) and Blip.TV. They each offer it in different download formats in case you want to take it with you. The highest quality versions are on Revver and Blip.TV.

Also, please feel free to grab the code and embed any of the WordCamp videos in your own sites. We filmed these lectures so that the millions of WordPress users who were NOT able to attend WordCamp would be able to hear the messages.

Matt Cutts on Whitehat SEO tips for Bloggers

The following video is embedded via Viddler, so it is possible to leave comments within the video. Just click on the icon that looks like a text balloon on the bottom right to insert your own thoughts.

Finally, there are about 30 WordCamp videos here now from the last three WordCamp’s I attended, so there is an amazing amount of information if you are just learning WordPress. Specifically there are videos from 2007, and from 2008.


{ 64 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Dr. David Klein August 6, 2007 at 7:00 am

Hey John! Thanks so much for making this amazing piece available. I was hoping it had gotten video taped. I don’t think the SEO world has found it yet. I am very glad I checked here.

Can you tell me who video taped this?

The video and sound came out amazingly good on this video, considering the environment there.

We are working on
the transcript of the video
at our site.

Thanks again!

Dr. David Klein

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2 John P. August 6, 2007 at 11:47 am

David,

Thanks for the appreciation. I was the guy standing up in the balcony all day both days getting all the lectures on tape. :-)

I was also impressed that the quality of the video turned out so good. I had to do a bit of editing to crank up the volume and even out the color a bit, but it’s a testament to the Canon XH A1 camcorder that it performed so well.

I think you’re right that the SEO world is not yet aware of this video. I had expected to see a little more traffic / discussion around it but so far not much… I also don’t think that Matt has yet realized that I posted it, so I guess I need to drop him an e-mail.

John P

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3 Colin Devroe August 6, 2007 at 12:12 pm

Sorry about the downtime John. Really. We had a hardware hiccup that we believe we’ve not only fixed, but have squashed so as to not occur again. I hope you’ll reconsider the use of the service, but if not – I wanted to thank you for sharing what you have so far.

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4 SEM Inc. August 6, 2007 at 12:29 pm

Great stuff John. Thanks for the video! Its always cool to get a “free pass” to these things because of someone’s camera. :)

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5 danny August 12, 2007 at 4:18 pm

Awesome video!!

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6 brian mca December 9, 2010 at 6:47 pm

yap you are right . this is awesome video

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7 uxdesign.com August 12, 2007 at 7:33 pm

Yes! And I was just regretting not having taken photo of Matt’s slides… well, would have been a good idea anyway, but this is great.
Thanks for taking the trouble John!

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8 Grumps August 13, 2007 at 4:18 pm

Its great to find these vids free here. Matt Cutts’ is the best SEO inside you can get anywhere.

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9 Kent Schnepp August 13, 2007 at 4:56 pm

John -

Thank you for posting this. Much appreciated!

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10 Steve Zabronsky August 15, 2007 at 12:21 am

Thanks, that was great. Excellent quality. I was disappointed that I was out of town for Wordcamp this year, and especially wanted to see this presentation.

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11 Gecko August 23, 2007 at 1:11 pm

Thanks for sharing this. It was informative and entertaining.

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12 TheDane August 24, 2007 at 4:16 am

Thanks for sharing John, I saw the video by you was mentioned on Matt Cutt’s blog as well :)

Kim:)

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13 John P. August 24, 2007 at 9:26 am

Yes, this video is really making the rounds. I think it’s been watched over 50,000 times now on the various video sharing sites. It’s really getting some publicity.

This of course is thanks to the fame of Matt Cutts, and not to my excellent videography skills. ;-)

John

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14 Urbanist September 7, 2007 at 2:16 am

Takeaways for me:

Already knew this but I think it’s a good reminder (which Matt gives early on and again at the end) to shuffle various keywords into posts. It’s easy to get lazy and not do this, but with experience it’s also not to hard TOO do this.

Somehow I never used Ultimate Tag Warrior or SEO Title Tags, even though I’ve been annoyed about how Google displays post search results on the web. I downloaded and uploaded these in the background while watching this and can’t wait to see Google reindex my posts without the Web Urbanist >> in front of them.

Finally, it is my firm believe – partially confirmed by Cutts – that the most important part of a post is the title for Google indexing. I like to use titles like … This Amazing Thing: 8 Reasons to Learn More About It – in order to get maximum mileage out of the keywords and to have it turn up on relevant searches. However, with Title Tags this might not be necesssary!

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15 ArticleRow September 26, 2007 at 7:31 am

Hi,

This is very-very cool information.
Thanks for writing about this.
Keep good post always.

Cheers

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16 Sasha T. October 13, 2007 at 6:41 am

I don’t have time to watch the video right now but I believe it has some good points. It goes straight to my bookmarks.

When it comes to Matt Cutts I’m always afraid how much truth is he telling. Maybe it is just me but I don’t like the guy :)

S.

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17 Dr David Klein October 13, 2007 at 7:27 am

Sasha,

I can’t tell by the smiley face if you meant that, or are buds with Matt and are yanking our chain.

When I have talked to Matt one on one, he actually comes across as an honest sincere guy who really cares about what he is doing.

He has been with Google for a long time, and with stock incentives can you even imagine how much money he must have? So I don’t think he does what he does anymore because of any need to trick us. I think he honestly is trying to make information more widely available and make the world a better place. I am sure he is not doing it for the money at this point.

Call me a Cuttlet, but he has helped me out a ton, his information has proven to me at least to be spot on, so I have quite a bit of appreciation for him.

dk

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18 John P. October 13, 2007 at 10:41 am

I’ll have to agree with David here. I’ve met / communicated numerous times with Matt, and I do believe he is quite genuine.

I do understand the skepticism, because it’s not healthy to blindly trust what the representative of any company publicly espouses on it’s own. But in Matt’s case all I’ve ever heard him say is “this is the way we do things around here”. I have never heard him say that the way Google does it is perfect, or the only way.

Now, if you get the feeling that he is holding back information – well, he is! You have to expect that. But he shares more information than anyone at any other public company I’ve ever known.

John

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19 Rhoody October 13, 2007 at 11:05 am

It seems he is a great guy, and I did like this hour watching him. It is very obvious that he enjoys what he is doing

Rhoody

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20 TheDane October 14, 2007 at 12:36 pm

I read Matt’s blog as well, it is a really good source of information for webmasters. I particularlry like it when he goes in to specific cases from his readers and tells them what they need to fix.

Kim:)

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21 Longview web designer December 5, 2007 at 5:15 pm

Cool. I too like Matt’s tips, so I’ll be watching the videos now :)

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22 fred January 8, 2008 at 9:31 am

That was a great video. Some real nice tips in there.

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23 narcisa January 12, 2008 at 4:56 pm

great video, I have some of his videos on my blog as well. This guy is brilliant.

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24 Aurelius Tjin February 7, 2008 at 9:17 pm

Matt is the man!

This is an information that is obviously of great value. I totally agree with your statements.Thanks for sharing it!

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25 Tomasz Stasiuk April 19, 2008 at 7:11 pm

Long video, but loooaaads of great information! I am so thankful when these conferences are recorded and made available online. Kudos!

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26 Lee May 13, 2008 at 10:14 am

Thank you for the video, learned a lot today! thanks!!

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