When anyone discusses the history of SEO and search in a broad context, Matt Cutts must inevitably come up. He is the Sultan of Search, the King of Content, the Guardian of Google’s Results. Matt Cutts is, in this article, compared to Alan Greenspan. As Greenspan was to the Federal Reserve, so is Cutts to Google. It sounds more like an essay question than a true comparison, but it’s accurate nonetheless.

Many supplicants invoked the name of Matt Cutts, the 38-year-old head of Google’s Web spam team. He’s the public face to thousands of Webmasters and search engine optimization (SEO) marketers who practice the art of making sure Google’s search engines take note of their clients’ sites. Cutts posts about algorithm changes on Google’s blog. “SEO is a huge business, and Cutts is at the center of it,” says Gabriel Weinberg, founder of search engine DuckDuckGo. In 2010 the SEO market in North America reached $16.6 billion, according to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. “

Matt Cutts’ words are followed pretty closely by the people to whom it matters most–search engine optimization professionals and online publishers. Cutts’ opinions about search, content, and blogs can shift millions of dollars worth of advertising revenue, just because he says so. It’s an impressive power, one that isn’t quite comparable to Greenspan’s powers, but still impressive nevertheless.

You can do all the search engine optimization you want, but if your site is badly designed, then the overall effect is void. Generating links is key to any good search engine optimization campaign, so if you want to boost your site’s search engine rank or improve your results, then designing an SEO-friendly website is key.

Roughly 72% of how search engines generate their rankings is based on external factors—external links to the site (66%) and social media (6%), according to search engine optimization software provider SEOmoz. That means retailers have to prioritize how users see their sites when looking at their site design and give them a reason to link to their pages, Eric Enge, Stone Temple Consulting president, told attendees at the conference.

All of this information is useful. The way a website is designed effects all of the criteria by which search engines judge them. Search engine optimization is more of an art than a science, and website design is an integral part of that. SEO professionals and website designers here in Illinois should pay special attention to the facts in the article linked above.

For those who aren’t aware, SearchEngineWatch is a gold mine of information on search engine optimization’s latest trends, news, and developments. This article, in particular, is a great example of advice that is being given out at that site for free–you won’t find such top notch advice on SEO in many other places. Anyway, enough gushing–you get the point, SearchEngineWatch is good. My Illinois-based friends would be wise to bookmark the site.

The article linked above is about how to achieve links from journalists. In the SEO industry, this is everything–it determines whether you will get just a couple of visits on a certain day, or whether you can really move some traffic towards your designated sites.

If you want a link on a quality online media, then you need a story. Assuming you’ve already identified the appropriate media through your link prospecting research and the relevant journalist, you now need to give them something that’s going to make their product more interesting, temporal, and relevant to their readers.

This piece of advice is particularly sanguine, but the entire article is well-written and well-thought out. Nichola Stott, the author, gets bonus points for offering advice in fool-proof form, step by step.

My favorite part of this article is the statement about other people viewing SEO as some sort of “voodoo”. It’s 100% true, the SEO industry makes excessive use of buzzwords that lack meaning to the average person. These buzzwords are informative only to those who know their meanings and often serve to scare away newcomers to the SEO industry. However, this article breaks down the process of achieving a high ranking in Google, without using overly complicated language or obscure industry buzzwords.

The reason I say that is because ultimately the user decides what the profile of a top ranking site should be. Google, Bing, and other search engines have historically spent millions (if not billions) of dollars on trying to create the best information retrieval system for humans who are looking for information based on search phrases.

The article emphasized that understanding the user is absolutely key. The SEO professional must target the needs of the Internet user and figure out what they need and want. There must also be a content strategy in place, that is essential.

Derrick Wheeler is the SEO specialist at Microsoft–he is in charge of all search engine optimization for all of Microsoft. This isn’t exactly an easy task, it’s a fairly massive operation. This interview at WebProNews is with Derrick Wheeler and it is well worth reading in full. But, just as a teaser, I’ll post a snippet of the interview for the casual reader in hopes of luring him over to the full interview:

“It’s a large complicated website where the content is generated by multiple business units in many different countries in many different languages, and you’re trying to get things done within a complex, large organization, where there’s just a lot of dependencies – a lot of stakeholders – a lot of different interests,” explains Wheeler.

“A lot of people talk about ‘content is king. content is king,’ says Wheeler. “With ‘mega SEO,’ structure is king because without structure, your content won’t even be discovered.”

This certainly seems like a good piece of advice. Mega-sites have so much content that it can get lost in the jungle of available information. Microsoft is certainly no exception to this. Rather, it’s the textbook example. Wheeler can be trusted on the subject, he likely has a good deal of experience with how NOT to structure a mega-website.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!