===== Google Recommended SEO =====

Matt Cutts links to a video called, [[http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-site-review-session-from-google-io-2010/|SEO site review session from Google I/O 2010]].

Here are some notes from it.  They're in the order they were brought up in the video, not order of importance.

  - meta name "KeyWords" is not used.
  - A good meta description is useful.
  - Put the text that users will type into your page.  (Or allow commenters to provide further useful description.)  Look in your server logs.
  - Keep your CMS up-to-date. Sites get hacked.  Protect (chmod) wp-admin.  A lot of Googlers' own sites got hacked. ([[http://compromisedblogs.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/list-of-compromised-blogs/|Sounds familiar]].)
  - Title text matters.
  - Useful words in the URL are good.  Page content is even more important, though.
  - Use Google Webmaster Central  (It lets you know if it has malware on it.)
  - Google Web Toolkit (AdWords written in it.)  Ajax more crawlable.
  - Google Skipfish
  - [[http://google.com/webmasters]]
  - Owner Verified Listings in Google Maps
  - In URLs, use dashes to separate words rather than underscores.  (Google processes words with underscores as one bigger word.)
  - Show related content on the page.  Works great for YouTube.
  - Be consistent with your internal links. (Use rel="canonical")  (Use or don't use "www." and "index.htm", etc. consistently.)  If you use different urls for the same pages that'll divide up your page rank amongst them.

===== Search Terms ====

Google, Search Engine Optimization, AJAX, crawl.