Good day, my SEO warriors and heroes! Here at Search Engine Academy, during SEO training, we mention Google’s Webspam leader, Matt Cutts and what he says that Google is looking for in web pages. Anyways, he’s come out with a couple things lately, so I thought I’d say some words about his latest and greatest.
Matt was recently asked the question, “as it relates to SEO, is there a difference between using <strong> and <b> tags?” Recall from your basic HTML (or not!) that these two tags make words bold. OK.
So according to Matt, it doesn’t matter which one you use, because they’re treated the same for indexing and ranking pages. However, he did point out that the <strong> tag is used for presentation, but the <b> tag is used for semantics. Put another way, the <strong> tag is easier to understand, because it’s meaning is clearer. <Strong> shows text strongly.
<Bold> is used as a method to make text bold. OK, I’m done. Code-wise, it makes sense. Can you tell I’m so not a programmer? Yeah, I failed that aptitude test miserably.
So, I guess if you want to use clean code, take the meanings above and use them in the context presented.
Next…
Matt was asked about guest blogging…how to do it without looking like a spammer to Google. Good question!
Oh wait, Wheel of Fortune just came on – I need to go change it, ugh! Whooo, Weather Channel live…that’s much better!
Alrighty, back to guest blogging. You may remember way back when (April 2012) Google introduced us to the link killer Penguin. You may also remember in the mad panic that ensued, people started to scramble for easy link building and glommed onto guest blogging. So, it got out of hand what with people guest authoring (I use that term loosely in this context) on eleventy billion blogs. As usual, too much of a good thing, and so Google got the axe out again, and put the kibosh on excessive guest blogging.
There’s this sweet video of Matt doing some mattsplaining on what is bad guest blogging (using way too much keyword-crazy anchor text and writing grossly, grossly off-topic stuff), vs. what is good guest blogging (much less emphasis on keywords all over the article, an author bio, and an expert who wrote said article).
So, you can view it here…
Anyways, that’s the latest word from Google’s Matt Cutts.
What SEO have you been doing lately? Drop us a line in the comments, tell us what you’re up to – content marketing, link building, structured data markup, ??? Recovering from Google Panda or Penguin? I hope not!
Until next time, please keep it between the ditches, SEO comrades!!!
All the very best to you,