Matt Cutts Recommended WordPress Plugins & Tools

Posted by Brian Weber on December 21, 2010, filed in: Interviews, Tips

What Would Matt Cutts Do?

In a recent interview on WordPress Community Podcast with Matt Cutts he talked about keeping all this SEO stuff simple. Matt is a software engineer at Google but is best know as the SEO Google guy. He is the guy that all these spammers and SEO pundits are trying to outsmart. Good luck!!! His advice just keep it simple, basic and human readable….oh and add an image to liven it up!!

Think about what you want to write and what your readers want to read that is interesting and don’t worry about all these plugins and tools. Google for the most part does a really good job.

He really likes the new WordPress 3.0 which has really improved in how it handles all the code that search engines read.

Matt does not use a lot of WP Plugins.

He does recommend that you do a little keyword research if you want to rank better using Google Webmaster Tools and making sure some of those keywords are in the body of your post. But don’t over do it by repeating too many times.
It’s also good to have those keywords in your URL. So when writing your titles for your blog post you might want to edit the URL to include those keywords if not already in the title. It’s easier now with WP 3.0 to set titles and tweaking URLs.
Make sure you read your post out loud so that it flows well and not a post written for search engines but for readers to enjoy.
He used to use the All in One SEO but with WordPress 3.0 he does not install this anymore. WP 3.0 has introduce canonical URLs which was the big feature of All in One SEO.
It does not hurt to install this but it gets to a point of diminishing returns, just write good content and people will link to you which will increase your probability of ranking better.

So do meta tags matter?

No, don’t bother to write Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions as Google does not read that data. Waste of time to edit.

Plugins he uses today

Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
Cookies for Comments – Sets a cookie on a random URL that is then checked when a comment is posted. If the cookie is missing the comment is marked as spam.
Feedburner – Sidebar widget to easy customize and display your FeedBurner RSS subscribers stats button.
Polls – Create and manage PollDaddy polls.
W3 Total Cache – Easily optimize the speed and user experience of your site with caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support.