Google’s Matt Cutts spoke on why WordPress is the best blogging platform for search engine optimization and gave some blog SEO tips.

WordPress a “fantastic choice” for SEO

Matt Cutts praised WordPress for being an SEO-friendly platform. WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues bloggers might have.

It is a fantastic piece of software, makes your blog easily crawlable by search engines, solves some 80-90% of mechanics of SEO and is the first big step anyone can take towards creating a popular online business. Watch the full presentation and see below for the summary of blog tips:

Blog SEO: What bloggers need to know?

Google cares about relevancy and reputation. You want your blog to be a very reputable place with a lot of relevant quality content about your topic.

• Reputation is external; it is what people say about you and how people link to you from their blogs, websites, and social media.

• Relevancy is internal; it is the stuff that you write.

For gaining a good reputation and good links, high quality, linkable / sharable content makes a difference.

Publish videos. Videos are very sharable and linkable, they spread fast and they tend to rank very well in Google’s search engine results. It is not all about the number of links pointing to you though, it is about the quality and importance of places that point to you.

To be relevant you need to think about what your target group would type into Google to find the topics to write about. Think in regular English, in language that people in your target group speak.

Use Google Keyword Tool to find the demand for the different keywords. When you know keywords that you want to target, include those keywords naturally when writing your articles.

How to optimize WordPress blog SEO

Matt Cutts’ advice is not to worry about small things, but to spend time on writing great and targeted content that your audience would share and link to. There are few things he recommends you do in your WordPress admin:

Create a permanent redirect of your domain name. In Settings – General choose either www version or non-www version and stick with it.

Create a custom permalink structure of your blog posts and pages. Having keywords from your blog post titles in your blog URL is a very important step in ranking well in search engines. Go into Settings – Permalinks and choose “Post Name” or “Custom Structure”: /%category%/%postname%/

If you use categories when publishing your blog posts, make sure that categories have keywords in them as well.

Have a blog post title different than the URL itself to help cover a few more keywords that you couldn’t cover if they were both identical. Use the “Edit” button on the side of your permalink when writing a new post to change the URL.

Show related blog posts at the end of your articles to reduce bounce rate and increase page views and time spent on your blog. Several plugins are available for this including YARPP.

Make sure to use a WordPress theme with a clean code. Matt Cutts is using Thesis Theme on his blog and praises it for clean CSS.

Keep your software upgraded to the latest version to secure your WordPress blog. Previous versions of WordPress are easier to hack and that can affect your SEO negatively.